436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

I don't trust compliments. I've been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn't. But generally when people give you compliments there's one of two things wrong with them. Either they're false, or what's worse is they're sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they're offering you their loyalty. And I'm kind of a stingy... Well, I don't necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let's skip the compliments.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.

Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

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

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.