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 Quote

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
- Norman Mailer Quote

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
- Norman Mailer Quote

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.
- Norman Mailer Quote

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 Quote

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
- Norman Mailer Quote

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
- Norman Mailer Quote

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
- Norman Mailer Quote

I hate everything which is not in myself.
- Norman Mailer Quote

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
- Norman Mailer Quote

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.
- Norman Mailer Quote

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
- Norman Mailer Quote

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
- Norman Mailer Quote

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
- Norman Mailer Quote

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
- Norman Mailer Quote

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
- Norman Mailer Quote

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
- Norman Mailer Quote

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
- Norman Mailer Quote

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
- Norman Mailer Quote

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
- Norman Mailer Quote

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
- Norman Mailer Quote

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
- Norman Mailer Quote

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
- Norman Mailer Quote

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
- Norman Mailer Quote

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
- Norman Mailer Quote

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.
- Norman Mailer Quote

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
- Norman Mailer Quote

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
- Norman Mailer Quote

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
- Norman Mailer Quote