Norman Mailer

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”

“It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.”

“Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.”

“I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false, or what’s worse is they’re sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they’re offering you their loyalty. And I’m kind of a stingy… Well, I don’t necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let’s skip the compliments.”

“... it all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face.”

“In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.”

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

“No heart is so hard as the timid heart.”

“Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”

“The paradox is that no love can prove so intenseas the love of two narcissists for each other.”

“Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.”

“There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.”

“You men are a bunch of god-damned women.”

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

“Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.”

“No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.”

“When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.”

“...and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.”

“A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.”

“That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.”

“I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.”

“...the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.”

“Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint...a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher's block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch's curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me.”

“The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.”

“At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.”

“I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.”

“We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches--the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small--the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia--life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.”

“We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.”

“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.”

“Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.”

“I guess all that's left is to love the fire.”

“America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.”

“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. ”

“The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

“I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.”

“You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.”

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

“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.”

“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 writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”

“You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.”

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”

“Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.”

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

“The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.”

“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”

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