Norman Mailer citations

Page 2

“One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”

“Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”

“The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.”

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”

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

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

“Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”

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

“Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart”

“There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.”

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”

“The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.”

“I guess all that's left is to love the fire.”

“Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon”

“Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.”

“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.”

“Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.”

“You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.”

“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”

“I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."”

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

“What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.”

“I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.”

“Culture is worth a little risk.”

“"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5”

“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.”

“The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.”

“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”