Norman Mailer citations (166 citations, Page 5)

"Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.

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

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Norman Mailer

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

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

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Norman Mailer livre 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.”

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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.”

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Norman Mailer livre Barbary Shore

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

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

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Norman Mailer livre Barbary Shore

McLeod, in Ch. 29
Barbary Shore (1951)

“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.”

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Norman Mailer

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

“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.”

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Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

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Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“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.”

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Norman Mailer livre An American Dream

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

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

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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.”

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Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

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

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Norman Mailer livre 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.”

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Norman Mailer

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

“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.”

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Norman Mailer livre The Naked and the Dead

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

“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.”

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Norman Mailer

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