436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.

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

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.