Norman Mailer Quotes

1923–2007 United States

Norman Mailer (31 January 1923 – 10 November 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director who is considered to have been innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism.

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Random Norman Mailer quote

124 quotes

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

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one.

Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967)

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art.

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

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

Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977)

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.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

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

An American Dream (1965)

The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

An American Dream (1965)

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

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

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.

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

I hate everything which is not in myself.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

Barbary Shore (1951)

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

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

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

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

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

The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (1968)

What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?

A Fire on the Moon (1970)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Norman Mailer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.