Norman Mailer: Man

Norman Mailer was American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Norman Mailer: 330   quotes 7   likes

“A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.”

Norman Mailer

Address on "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation" at the University of California at Berkeley, as quoted in TIME magazine (6 November 1972) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942598-2,00.html, which also reported that at the close of his address:
: Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."

Soul

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)
Context: Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

God

“To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder…”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Context: To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder… The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

Fear

“There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)
Context: There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly.
I just thought — this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is — I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used."

“The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

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

Nature

“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

“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)

Love , People , Fools , Mountain

“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)

Feeling , Rage

“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)

God , Angels

“Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.”

Norman Mailer

News summaries (31 December 1969)

Love , Women , Making love , Thinking

“We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”

Norman Mailer

Marilyn (1973), Ch. 1

Love , Beauty , Thinking

“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 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

“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

“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

“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