Quotes from Norman Mailer

You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states.

It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

Despair is the emotion we feel at the death of beings within us.

Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed the armies of the absurd.

A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.

Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.

Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian?

When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.

Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly—they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.

Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.

There's an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that's not good enough, you build a fence around the fence.

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.

but I am infinitely more sorrowful about the two victims' families than the fact Mr. Gilmore is no longer alive.

He had been certain that religion was there for a very good practical reason. It couldn't be simpler—you had to keep the weak and unruly in order. But a man of pride (such as himself) could do as he chose.

Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he'd ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.

When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun's relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He

There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system." "Of course there is. Doesn't that fit human nature?

God is a luxury I don't give myself.

Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism!

Think of how hot a fire must be to call out the will of iron that is in the ore. Iron is strong against every force except the one that made it into iron.

Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities—the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with.