Norman Mailer: Trending quotes

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Norman Mailer: 330 quotes7 likes

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”

Norman Mailer

Review of the book My Hope for America (1964) by Lyndon B. Johnson
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

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

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

Source: Advertisements for Myself

“Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon”

Norman Mailer book Harlot's Ghost

Source: Harlot's Ghost

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Source: The Naked and the Dead

“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.”

Norman Mailer

"Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

“You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.”

Norman Mailer

D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 1

“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.”

Norman Mailer

As quoted in The Sunday Herald http://web.archive.org/web/20071112125539/http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1824217.0.norman_mailer_1923_2007.php [Scotland] (11 November 2007)

“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."”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 28

“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”

Norman Mailer

Newsweek (22 October 1984)

“What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 18
Barbary Shore (1951)

“I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.”

Norman Mailer

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)

“Culture is worth a little risk.”

Norman Mailer

As quoted in "The Poetic License to Kill" by Lance Morrow, in TIME magazine (1 February 1982) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,955021,00.html

“"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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

“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
An American Dream (1965)