Quotes by Norman Mailer

About Norman Mailer:

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

Norman Mailer

It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to impr...

Norman Mailer

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.

Norman Mailer

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 d...

Norman Mailer

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.

Norman Mailer

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

Norman Mailer

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

Norman Mailer

Sometimes I doubt that anyone with a philosophical turn of mind is fit to judge anyone. He never comprehends the concept of guilt.

Norman Mailer

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.

Norman Mailer

Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.

Norman Mailer

I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.

Norman Mailer

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

Norman Mailer

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

Norman Mailer

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years befor...

Norman Mailer

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

Norman Mailer

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

Norman Mailer

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 ...

Norman Mailer

It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.

Norman Mailer

rip the prisons open put the convicts on television

Norman Mailer

I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You mean a good book Oh, dear, did I say the good book sighed the witch.

Norman Mailer

Author Bio

  • NameNorman Mailer
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate
  • BornJanuary 21, 1923
  • DiedNovember 10, 2007
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Actor; Film Director; Screenwriter; Novelist; Essayist; Writer; Playwright
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Fiction; Pulitzer Prize For General Non-Fiction; National Book Award; George Polk Award