436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

You can’t change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can’t change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.

Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.

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

I always start a book for money. If you’re married five times you have to.

Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.

Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives.

By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.