Norman Mailer: Trending quotes

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Norman Mailer: 330 quotes7 likes

“A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”

Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

“It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 87
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

“Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.”

"A Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day"
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

“It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. … It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.”

Vanity Fair (May 1984)

“The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 33
Barbary Shore (1951)

“I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.”

As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 43

“The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"First Advertisement for Myself"
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.”

Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

“I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."”

Interview for French TV (1998)

“Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”

"The Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon

“Hitler … was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire.”

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Ch. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=BxRbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+only+true+journey+of+knowledge+is+from+the+depth+of+one+being+to+the+heart+of+another%22&pg=PA11#v=onepage <br class="br">An American Dream (1965)

“Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.”

Interview for French TV (1998)