Norman Mailer Quotes - Page 7

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

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.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

It all comes down to who does the dishes.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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'.

Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.

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.

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.

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

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

Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.

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

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.

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

I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.

If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.

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

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.