436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

You’re gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God – this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.

It’s not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

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.

I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.

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.

I don’t trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you’re half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

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

Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification – patriotism!