Norman Mailer: Quotes about people

“He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.”

Norman Mailer

On Richard Nixon
Interview for French TV (1998)

People , Pleasure , Personality

“A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation;”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.

People , Secret , Imagination

“America was the land where people still believed in heroes.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes.

People

“The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture”

Norman Mailer

People , Faith

“I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.”

Norman Mailer

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

Love , People , Art , Effort

“In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)

People

“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

“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

People

“Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Life , People , History , Game

“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)

People , Youth

“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 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

“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