Norman Mailer Quotes

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Norman Mailer

Human, Single, Same

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer

Men, Beautiful, Heart

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Norman Mailer

Life, Here, Purpose

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
Norman Mailer

Living, Moment, Less

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer

Winning, Small, Honor

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
Norman Mailer

America, Here, Few

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer

Men, Writing, Books

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer

Life, Law, Same

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer

Tough, Dance, Guys

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer

Suffering, Socialism, Level

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

Life, Men, American

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer

Another, Growth, Bit

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Norman Mailer

Smart, Person, Enough

We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
Norman Mailer

God, Devil, Nor

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Norman Mailer

Few, Lies, Born

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer

Live, Giving, Child

I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer

Hate, Everything

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
Norman Mailer

Men, History, Actions

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Norman Mailer

Horror, Century, Event

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer

Marriage, Children, Woman

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Norman Mailer

Democracy, Far, Until

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
Norman Mailer

Stupid, Live, America

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
Norman Mailer

Mind, Impossible, Become

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Norman Mailer

Trust, America, Few

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer

Anxiety, Natural, Role

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Biography

Nationality: American

Born: January 31, 1923

Died: November 10, 2007

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