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 ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

An American Dream (1965)

I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him.

The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

The Presidential Papers (1963)

And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.

The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)

I would guess that most men who understand women at all feel hostility toward them. At their worst, women are low sloppy beasts.

The Presidential Papers (1963)

To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive.

You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Barbary Shore (1951)

We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.

Marilyn (1973)

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

Armies of the Night (1968)

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

A Fire on the Moon (1970)

It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder… The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

Attribution

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