Norman Mailer Quotes

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

Writing a best-seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous that anticipated.

When a novel comes, it’s a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

All the security around the American President is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught.

The true religion of America has always been America.

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

So we think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.

The surest way not to be remembered is to talk about the way you want to be.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

A high church for the true mediocre.

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

The Naked and the Dead.