Norman Mailer Quotes

• In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in America, Trust

  Tags in Irreverent, Unless

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Psychic, Bullet

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Shaky, Smart, Writing

• I hate everything which is not in myself.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hate, Myself

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sanity, Combination

• I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

  Norman Mailer

  Tags in Here, Shrink

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

  Norman Mailer

  Tags in Jungle, Sophistication

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

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Little, Depends

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Him, Extraordinary

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

  Norman Mailer

  Tags in Grenade, Diane

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Retreating, Little

• Culture’s worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we’re all totalitarian beasts.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, Beast

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Masculinity, Honor

• Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Alimony, Curse

• A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stopped, Tyranny

• 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

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Marriage

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

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Law And Lawyers

• Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Book

• 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

  Tags in Television

• You never really know a woman until you meet her in court.

  Norman Mailer

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women

Norman Mailer (68)

Birth:	31st January, 1923
Death:	10th November, 2007
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Actor, Filmmaker, Novelist, Playwriter

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Births

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• 1947 - Zoe Lofgren
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Deaths

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• 1935 - Kurt Tucholsky
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• 1958 - Lion Feuchtwanger