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Norman Mailer Quotes
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Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him renown. His best-known work is widely considered to be The Executioner's Song winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the National Book Award.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism. Mailer was also known for his essays, the most famous and reprinted of which is "The White Negro". He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, essays, and frequent media appearances. In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 1969 he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the mayor of New York.

While principally known as a novelist and journalist, Mailer was not afraid to bend genres and venture outside his comfort zone; he lived a life that seemed to embody an idea that echoes throughout his work: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."

✵ 31. January 1923 – 10. November 2007
Norman Mailer photo
Norman Mailer: 165   quotes 7   likes

Norman Mailer Quotes

“There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.”

Norman Mailer

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

World , Sex , Business

“One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

People , Pleasure , World , Angels

“The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

Sex , Birth , Science , Past

“I hate everything which is not in myself.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Sgt. Sam Croft, in Pt. 1, Ch. 5
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Hate

“The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”

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.

People , Art

“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.”

Norman Mailer

As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter

Suffering

“Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

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

“The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 14
Barbary Shore (1951)

Life , Hunger , Suffering , Wine

“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

McLeod, in Ch. 29
Barbary Shore (1951)

History

“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”

Norman Mailer

Timothy Madden, in Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), Ch. 1

Mood , Light , Winter , Summer

“For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Books , Sex , Housing

“Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Art , Passion

“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 … We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

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

Girl

“With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”

Norman Mailer

As quoted in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (1968) by David W. Noble, p. 204

“One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Love

“There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"The Homosexual Villain"; this has also been widely misquoted as: "There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality."
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

“The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.”

Norman Mailer

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

Love , World , Nature , Thinking

“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)

Men , Past , Fight

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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

Winter

“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)

Angels , Animals

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Death , Loss

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

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Family

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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

Evil

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Love , Secret , Peace , Fight

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

Norman Mailer

Vanity Fair (May 1984)

Affliction

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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

Thinking

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

Norman Mailer

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)

Cheating

“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.”

Norman Mailer

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

Love , God , Courage , Loss

“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."”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sense

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Pleasure , Feeling , Personality

“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.”

Norman Mailer

"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

Books , Baby

“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.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

People , Secret , Heart

“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)

People , Stupidity

“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
An American Dream (1965)

Knowledge , Heart

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

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

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

Parting , Cry

“All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Men , Disappointment , Imagination , Courage

“Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Optimism , Future

“I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

Love , Life , Hate , Marriage

“There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.”

Norman Mailer

As quoted in The International Herald Tribune (24 January 1992)

Sex