436 Quotes by Norman Mailer

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.