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Norman Mailer

American writer (1923–2007)

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.

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.
We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.

Quotes

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One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one.
 
One becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
 
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.
 
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
  • 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.
    • "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
    • "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
    • "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
    • "Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself" in The New York Times Book Review (17 September 1965)
  • You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.
    • D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 1
  • This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.
    • D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 10
  • One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
  • With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
    • As quoted in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (1968) by David W. Noble, p. 204
  • 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.
    • News summaries (31 December 1969)
  • Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.
    • News summaries (31 December 1969)
  • The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television.
  • 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), Part 1, Chapter 2, page 28
  • What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?
    • A Fire on the Moon (1970), Part 1, Chapter 3, page 61 (referring to Werner von Braun's obligatory worry about the colossal and dangerous fuel tanks in rockets).
  • 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 Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon
  • 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), Ch. 1
  • 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.
  • A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.
    • Address on "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation" at the University of California at Berkeley, as quoted in TIME magazine (6 November 1972), which also reported that at the close of his address:
Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."
  • The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
    • As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter
  • 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.
    • As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 43
  • Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
    • Ancient Evenings (1983) First lines
  • 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.
    • Ancient Evenings (1983) Last lines
  • Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
    • Vanity Fair (May 1984)
  • Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.
    • Timothy Madden, in Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), Ch. 1
  • When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
    • On Tough Guys Don't Dance as quoted in The New York Times (8 June 1984)
  • Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
    • Newsweek (22 October 1984)
  • I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.
    • His reaction to a publisher's rejection of The Deer Park because of six "salacious lines" he would not remove, as quoted in The New York Times (21 July 1985)
  • On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
    • Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
  • What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.
    • Kittredge Gardiner, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
  • I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
    • Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
  • There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
    • As quoted in The International Herald Tribune (24 January 1992)
  • Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
    • Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
  • 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.
    • Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
  • The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.
    • Herbst Theater, San Francisco City Arts & Lectures Series, (5 February 2007)
  • Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

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Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful …
 
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
  • For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …
    • Mailer's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition (1998)
  • 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.
    • Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 3
  • I hate everything which is not in myself.
    • Sgt. Sam Croft, in Pt. 1, Ch. 5
  • 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.
    • Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
  • The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
    • Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
  • 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.
    • Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
  • There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
    • Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 11
  • 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.
    • Lieutenant Robert Hearn, Pt. 2, Ch. 12
  • He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.
    • On Sgt. Sam Croft and Mt. Anaka, in Pt. 3, Ch. 3
  • Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.
    • Pt. 3, Ch. 10
  • You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.
    • Pt. 3, Ch. 14
  • He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea…. Hot dog!
    • On Maj. Dalleson, in Pt. 4, Ch. 1

Barbary Shore (1951)

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  • Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
    • Ch. 10
  • The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.
    • Ch. 14
  • There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.
    • Michael Lovett, in Ch. 14
  • What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.
    • Michael Lovett, in Ch. 18
  • The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
    • Ch. 18
  • He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.
    • Lannie Madison, on the assassination of Leon Trotsky, in Ch. 21
  • 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.
    • Ch. 26
  • 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."
    • Ch. 28
  • The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
    • Michael Lovett, in Ch. 33

The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)

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Published in New Short Novels 2 (1956)
  • I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.
    • Ch. 1
  • 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.
    • Ch. 5
  • The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.
    • Ch. 5
  • He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.
    • Ch. 5
  • However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.
    • Ch. 5
  • I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him.
    "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy."
    So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!
    • Ch. 5

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

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  • 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.
    • "First Advertisement for Myself"
  • There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
    • "The Homosexual Villain"; this has also been widely misquoted as: "There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality."
  • I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.
    • Sergius O'Shaugnessy, in "The Time of Her Time"
  • When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.
    • "Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out"
  • God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
    • "Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out"
  • Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
    • "The White Negro", first published in Dissent (Summer 1957)
  • To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic.
    • "The White Negro", first published in Dissent (Summer 1957)
  • 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.
    • "Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
  • The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.
  • "Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
  • The hipster comes our of a muted rebellion of the proletariat, he is, so to say, the lazy proletariat. The beatnik - often Jewish - comes from the middle class, and twenty-five years ago would have join the YCL [Young Communist League]. Today, he chooses not to work as a sentence against the conformity of his parents. Therefore he can feel moral value in his good-bye to society. The hipster is more easygoing about the drag and value of a moneyless life of leisure.
    • "Hipster and Beaknik, A Footnote to 'The White Negro'"

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

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  • Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
  • Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.
  • Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known.
  • Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?
  • America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity.
  • Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.
  • One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.
  • Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.
  • In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.
  • For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street.
  • There was Johnson (Lyndon) who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. … Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.
  • James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.
  • Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.
  • The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.
  • America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes.
  • It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. … It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love.
  • The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self.
  • A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.
  • Hitler … was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire.
  • Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.
  • The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself.
  • Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.
  • The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.
  • Hungry fighters win fights.
  • Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.
  • All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination.
  • There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.
  • One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love.
  • Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.

The Presidential Papers (1963)

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  • 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.
    • Preface
  • In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
    • Preface
  • 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.
    • Preface
  • A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.
  • 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.
    • The Fourth Presidential Paper — Foreign Affairs : Letter To Castro
  • I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
    • The Sixth Presidential Paper — A Kennedy Miscellany : An Impolite Interview
  • At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.
    • The Sixth Presidential Paper — A Kennedy Miscellany : An Impolite Interview

An American Dream (1965)

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  • I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 … We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
  • Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
  • The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
  • Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 4
  • I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity — it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 5
  • 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.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 6
  • Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 7
  • The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
    • Detective Roberts, in Ch. 8
  • Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
    • Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 8

Cannibals and Christians (1966)

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We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art.
 
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
  • We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
    • Introducing our Argument
  • 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.
    • "Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
  • Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
    • "Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
  • Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
  • There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
    • Review of the book My Hope for America
  • 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.
    • "A Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day"

Armies of the Night (1968)

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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.
  • His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.
  • 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.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

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Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, New York: Random House, 2016
  • New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.
    • Pt. 2, p. 83
  • West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.
    • Pt. 2, p. 86
  • It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.
    • Pt. 2, p. 87
  • Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
    • Pt. 2, p. 88

The Executioner's Song (1979)

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Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs.
  • 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.

TIME interview (1991)

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"His Punch Is Better Than Ever" by Bonnie Angelo in TIME magazine (30 September 1991)
  • I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous.
    But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash — that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.
  • I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
    One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.
  • I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history.
    They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
    What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think — this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it — that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better.
  • We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.
  • It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man — I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.

Interview for French TV (1998)

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Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."
Interview (1998) made for French television, first broadcast on French and US television in October 2000, as quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times (4 October 2000)
  • I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.
  • I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."
  • We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.
  • I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A.A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.
    • On his role in the parole of Jack Abbott, during which Abbot killed a man.
  • Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
  • 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.
  • He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.
  • There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly.
    I just thought — this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is — I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used."

Quotes about Mailer

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When you talk of Norman Mailer, right away I see van Gogh's work boots. Norman was a working man. ~ Jimmy Breslin
 
Norman was ferociously smart … I … owed an enormous amount of why-Sandman-was-taken-seriously-in-the-early-years to Norman's quote on the cover of Season of Mists, for which I shall be forever grateful. ~ Neil Gaiman
 
He was interesting, because he was interested. … We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about. ~ Gore Vidal
Sorted alphabetically by author or source
  • The idea to make New York City a state, in case you didn't know, is not original with me...Most people, however, will remember the statehood idea as it was first put forth in Norman Mailer's campaign for Mayor in 1969. He gave the idea some pzazz, but not enough people took it seriously.
    • Bella Abzug Bella!: Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (1972)
  • That's a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer; he, uh, donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study.
  • How refreshing to go from Norman Mailer to Toni Morrison!
    • 1994 interview included in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999) translated from Spanish by Virginia Invernizzi
  • Alix Kates Shulman had no idea that its main principle, that "a woman and man should share equally the responsibility for their household and children in every way, from the insidiously unacknowledged tasks of daily life to the pleasures of guiding a young human to maturity," would cause such uproar. Reprinted in the debut issue of Ms., in Redbook (attracting two thousand letters), Life, a Harvard textbook on contract law, and other anthologies, it drew scorn from Norman Mailer, who famously mocked Shulman by declaring that he never would be married to a woman like her-he would never help his wife with the dishes!
    • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement (2018)
  • (“It was reported somewhere recently that your friend Norman Mailer said to you, in anger: "You're little, you're ugly, and you're as black as the ace of spades." But your comeback was not recorded.”) Oh, I just laughed. After all, it's true. But the point is, why, after all these years, did he have to say it? I mean, it's his problem, really, and I think it has to do with the fact that like most white liberals-though I'm not accusing him of being one exactly-he has always lied to himself about the way he really feels about Negroes.
    • 1969 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)
  • if you are a success, you run the risk that Norman has run and that I run, too, of becoming a kind of show business personality. Then the legend becomes far more important than the work. It's as though you're living in an echo chamber. You hear only your own voice. And, when you become a celebrity, that voice is magnified by multitudes and you begin to drown in this endless duplication of what looks like yourself. You have to be really very lucky, and very stubborn, not to let that happen to you. It's a difficult trap to avoid. And that's part of Norman's dilemma, I think. A writer is supposed to write. If he appears on television or as a public speaker, so much the better or so much the worse, but the public persona is one thing.
    • 1984 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)
  • When you talk of Norman Mailer, right away I see van Gogh's work boots. Norman was a working man. Lord, did he work. From one end of his life to the other, he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire. He leaves them to a nation that has surrendered all its years to converting truth to an untruthful excuse for killing
  • He was by nature bound to a style of excess … There were times when you would be fed up with him, but if you could conceive of American culture of the past 50 years without Norman Mailer, you would find it a lot drearier.
    • E.L. Doctorow, as quoted in "Norman Mailer, the Writer As Writer" by Hillel Italie, of the Associated Press (11 November 2007)
  • He was really the great chronicler of his time, the champion of personal reportage. His output was prodigious, his range of interests very wide, from Marilyn Monroe to Picasso to the art of graffiti to extreme forms of crime. His vaunted life as a public figure may have actually impeded serious critical attention to much of his work. Presumably, it will be possible now.
  • Norman was ferociously smart, and surprised me at one point when he went off on a rant about the English and quinine and tonic water by interrupting himself when he realised I was English and being desperately keen to make sure I hadn't taken offense — the opposite of the pugnacious image he'd acquired. I … owed an enormous amount of why-Sandman-was-taken-seriously-in-the-early-years to Norman's quote on the cover of Season of Mists, for which I shall be forever grateful.
  • men write about their life all the time. You know, Norman Mailer would put himself in his books, and no one made it seem that he was doing something less.
  • I was inventing it as I went along. And I didn't know where I was going to end up, and I did not have a large shape in mind. I felt that I was making the path as I was going along. I like Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer writing the novel as history, history as novel. I teach Armies of the Night; I use it to show students how we make history in the same way we write a novel. And as we narrate what's going on, we shape history. I also like that book a lot because he writes about the responsibility of the writer. Does the writer actually go out in the street and perform politics and

then write about it? Henry James and Wallace Stegner both said not to commit experience for the sake of the writing. Mailer questions that injunction and the notion of objectivity. The writer makes up the world out in the streets and at home in the ivory tower writing the story. I suppose we try to be as objective and as truthful as possible ("truthful" is the right word); still, we are affecting the truth.

  • In the beginning, Mailer spins publicity for convict and murderer Jack Abbott, helps get Abbott's prison book published and Abbott paroled. The con with the prose style of a Doberman (all speed and teeth) obeys his muse again. Six weeks after parole, Abbott kills a man in New York City's East Village. … It was common to hear New Yorkers say that he should be tried as an accessory to murder. Mailer barged around giving interviews and suing a newspaper for libel, looking truculent and stricken.
    In one way it was unfair: Mailer had had the courage to sponsor a talented pariah, and then something in Abbott's transition from prison went disastrously wrong. Mailer was personally aggrieved and pained, not only for Abbott but for Abbott's victim. It is true that certain writers adopt convicts: criminals, sinister, romantic and stupid as sharks, become the executive arms of intellectuals' violent fantasies. For some reason, intellectuals rarely understand that they are being conned: convicts are geniuses of ingratiation. Still, Mailer after all was not promoting a killer but a prose stylist and what he judged to be a salvageable human being. He miscalculated: he overrated the writer in Abbott and underestimated the murderer.
  • In high school, I'd devoured the works of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, moved by stories of men trying to find their place in an America that didn't welcome them. Later, studying the early civil rights movement in college, I'd been intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber on Dr. King's sermons and writings.
  • One night, we had a dinner party for the express purpose of introducing Mailer to Neil Gaiman. Neil, as was his habit, was so charming that Norman wanted to read The Sandman. He liked the series enough to provide a cover blurb for the next trade paperback collection. Neil later reported that bookstore buyers told him that the Mailer quote persuaded them to stock graphic novels. And the rest, as they say, is history.
  • Mailer is no Balzac of the twentieth century. And he is engrossed in his own grim effort of self-validation...Mailer's adversary disposition recalls D. H. Lawrence, his predecessor in the line of literary minds dedicated to the renovation of society by means of a revolution in the individual consciousness. But of the two, Lawrence is actually closer to our present literary spirit, for he is not only the more subjective writer but also the more abstract.
  • He was interesting, because he was interested. … I went to Provincetown a year or two ago and stayed with him and Norris. It was very pleasant. He was in good form. We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about.
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