Norman Mailer: Trending quotes

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Norman Mailer: 330 quotes7 likes

“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.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 8
An American Dream (1965)

“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”

Norman Mailer

A Fire on the Moon (1970), Pt. 1, Ch. 1

“Mysteries are irritated by facts.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Detective Roberts, in Ch. 8
An American Dream (1965)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Lannie Madison, on the assassination of Leon Trotsky, in Ch. 21
Barbary Shore (1951)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Presidential Papers (1963)

“Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 88
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

On Sgt. Sam Croft and Mt. Anaka, in Pt. 3, Ch. 3
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Armies of the Night (1968)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

“Hungry fighters win fights.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Fourth Presidential Paper — Foreign Affairs : Letter To Castro
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"The White Negro", first published in Dissent (Summer 1957)
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)

“The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.”

Norman Mailer

Herbst Theater, San Francisco City Arts & Lectures Series, (5 February 2007)

“Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

Sergius O'Shaugnessy, in "The Time of Her Time"
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 11
The Naked and the Dead (1948)