Norman Mailer: Trending quotes

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Norman Mailer: 330 quotes7 likes

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Lieutenant Robert Hearn, Pt. 2, Ch. 12
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“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?”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Pt. 3, Ch. 14
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Sixth Presidential Paper — A Kennedy Miscellany : An Impolite Interview
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 4
An American Dream (1965)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 6
An American Dream (1965)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

News summaries (31 December 1969)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 18

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out"
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

On his role in the parole of Jack Abbott, during which Abbot killed a man.
Interview for French TV (1998)

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Review of the book My Hope for America
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 83
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

“Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

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

“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.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 10

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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