110+ Norman Mailer Quotes On Writing, Provocative And Controversial

Norman Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist. He is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968 for his novel The Armies of the Night. Mailer wrote more than 40 books, including The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, and Ancient Evenings. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Norman Mailer on writing, provocative, controversial.

Top 10 Norman Mailer Quotes

1. Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
2. 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.
3. The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
4. Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.
5. There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
6. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
7. 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.
8. Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.
9. I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
10. I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

Norman Mailer Image Quotes

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

Norman Mailer Short Quotes

• Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
• Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
• We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
• The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.
• There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
• The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.
• Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
• Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
• The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
• I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

Norman Mailer Quotes About Writing

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day. — Norman Mailer

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. — Norman Mailer

Alimony is the curse of the writing class. — 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

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself. — Norman Mailer

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling. — Norman Mailer

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. — Norman Mailer

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you. — Norman Mailer

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself. — Norman Mailer

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Quotes About Live

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart — 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

We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods. — Norman Mailer

There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse. — Norman Mailer

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

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world. — Norman Mailer

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

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. — Norman Mailer

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. — Norman Mailer

To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Quotes About People

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

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

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery. — Norman Mailer

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on. — Norman Mailer

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched. — Norman Mailer

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture — Norman Mailer

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway. — Norman Mailer

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people? — Norman Mailer

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled. — Norman Mailer

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Quotes About Life

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

The condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience. — Norman Mailer

Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is. — Norman Mailer

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'. — Norman Mailer

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. — Norman Mailer

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. — Norman Mailer

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. — Norman Mailer

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

A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character. — Norman Mailer

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate. — Norman Mailer

One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago. — Norman Mailer

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz. — 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

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence. — Norman Mailer

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out. — Norman Mailer

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste. — Norman Mailer

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth. — 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

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

The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan. — Norman Mailer

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs. — Norman Mailer

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts. — 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

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge. — Norman Mailer

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle. — Norman Mailer

Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady — Norman Mailer

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil. — Norman Mailer

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other. — Norman Mailer

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world. — Norman Mailer

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. — Norman Mailer

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. — Norman Mailer

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood. — Norman Mailer

There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day. — 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

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

When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules. — Norman Mailer

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

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night. — Norman Mailer

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination. — Norman Mailer

Boredom slays more of existence than war. — Norman Mailer

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

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children. — Norman Mailer

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality. — Norman Mailer

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex? — Norman Mailer

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. — Norman Mailer

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. — Norman Mailer

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

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. — Norman Mailer

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. — Norman Mailer

I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation. — Norman Mailer

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won. — Norman Mailer

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

Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun. — Norman Mailer

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England. — Norman Mailer

I hate everything which is not in myself. — Norman Mailer

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that. — Norman Mailer

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder. — Norman Mailer

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it. — Norman Mailer

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so. — Norman Mailer

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells. — Norman Mailer

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

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied. — Norman Mailer

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. — Norman Mailer

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. — Norman Mailer

Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all, and there isn't any one of us that doesn't need a crutch. — Norman Mailer

We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. — Norman Mailer

The true religion of America has always been America. — Norman Mailer

On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago. — Norman Mailer

I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. — Norman Mailer

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time. — Norman Mailer

Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. — 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 are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. — Norman Mailer

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center. — Norman Mailer

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can. — Norman Mailer

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love. — Norman Mailer

Life Lessons by Norman Mailer

1. Norman Mailer taught us to be fearless in our pursuit of knowledge and creativity; to take risks and to never be afraid to stand out from the crowd.
2. He also reminded us of the importance of living life to the fullest and not letting fear or doubt stand in the way of our dreams.
3. Lastly, he showed us the power of resilience and determination in the face of adversity, and how to never give up in the pursuit of our goals.