436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

There's an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that's not good enough, you build a fence around the fence.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.

Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a space ship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communications faint.

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.

Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.

Despair is the emotion we feel at the death of beings within us.