Norman Mailer Quotes - Page 5

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.

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

The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

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

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

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

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

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

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

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

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

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.