Norman Mailer Quotes - Page 8

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

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.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

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.

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

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.

And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

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

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.

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.

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.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.

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.

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.