Norman Mailer: Likeness

“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”

Norman Mailer

Armies of the Night (1968)

World

“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

Rage

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

Norman Mailer

Newsweek (22 October 1984)

“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)

“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”

Norman Mailer

Kittredge Gardiner, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

Life , Evil , Personality

“What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other — where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

Study , Personality

“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)

Smile , Understanding , Animals

“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)

Pain , History

“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)

God , Suffering

“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)

World , Angels , Game , Past

“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 14

Life , Art , Time

“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