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.
Norman Mailer
- More quotations by Novelist
Norman Mailer quotes
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
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.
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.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
He got a corporation mind. He don't believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man.
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.
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.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
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.
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
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.
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.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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.
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Similiar authors
Walter Scott
Emily Bronte
Erich Segal
Gerard De Nerval
Charles W. Chesnutt
Norman Douglas
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbac
Ouida
Bertha von Suttner
William Makepeace Thacker