Norman Mailer Quotes - Page 4

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.

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.

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

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

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?

Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

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.

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.

I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.

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

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

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.

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