Norman Mailer: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved.”

Norman Mailer

TIME interview (1991)
Context: 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.

“A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation;”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: 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.

People , Secret , Imagination

“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”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: 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.

“America was the land where people still believed in heroes.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: 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.

People

“The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”

Norman Mailer

Introducing our Argument
Cannibals and Christians (1966)
Context: 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.

Sense , Night

“There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)
Context: 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."

“We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety.”

Norman Mailer

TIME interview (1991)
Context: 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.

Life

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

Norman Mailer

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”

Norman Mailer

Failure

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

Norman Mailer

War , Support

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Armies of the Night (1968)

World

“One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”

Norman Mailer

Love , Making love , Feeling , Learning

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
Source: Advertisements for Myself