Norman Mailer
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.Collection: Court
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.Collection: Heart
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heartCollection: Heart
Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.Collection: Beautiful
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.Collection: Knowing
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blindCollection: Might
When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.Collection: Kind
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.Collection: Soul
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.Collection: Real
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.Collection: War
Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.Collection: Love Is
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.Collection: Egomaniacs
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.Collection: Affliction
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.Collection: Beautiful
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.Collection: Psychics
To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.Collection: Women
Cancer is the growth of madness denied.Collection: Cancer
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.Collection: Stars
Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.Collection: Beautiful
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.Collection: War
The way you write affects what you say.Collection: Writing
The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Sports
The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.Collection: Vegetarianism
Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.Collection: Country
I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.Collection: Freedom
I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.Collection: Country
Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.Collection: Class
The condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience.Collection: Army
I really gave up being passionate about politics 10, 15, 20 years ago, because I think finally that there were forces in the country that are larger than politics itself. And so I find it a fascinating game, this wonderful stuff goes on in terms of watching the game. But If you get to down it, look, I`m going to root for someone, I`ll root at a football game, not for politicians.Collection: Country
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.Collection: Happiness
You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.Collection: Gambling
America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.Collection: Country
Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.Collection: Dying
God is a creator, not a law giver.Collection: Law
You have the right to speak your mind.Collection: Speak Your Mind
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.Collection: Sex
Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Men
Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.Collection: Men
Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.Collection: Ready
The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.Collection: Sweet
The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.Collection: Stars
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recaptureCollection: People
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.Collection: Facts
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.Collection: Life
I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.Collection: Love
The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.Collection: Memories
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.Collection: Winter