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
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
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
– Norman Mailer
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
– Norman Mailer
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
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
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
– Norman Mailer
He got a corporation mind. He don't believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man.
– Norman Mailer
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
– Norman Mailer
I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.
– Norman Mailer
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
– Norman Mailer
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
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
In my day the library was a wonderful place... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.
– Norman Mailer
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
– Norman Mailer
One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.
– Norman Mailer
Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.
– Norman Mailer
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
– Norman Mailer
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.
– Norman Mailer
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
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
– Norman Mailer
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
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
– Norman Mailer
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
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
– Norman Mailer
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
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
– Norman Mailer
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
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
– Norman Mailer
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
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
– Norman Mailer
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.
– Norman Mailer
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
– Norman Mailer
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
– Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.