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

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

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

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Norman Mailer

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Norman Mailer

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer

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

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

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

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer

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

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

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Norman Mailer

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

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
Norman Mailer

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

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
Norman Mailer

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