Quotes by Norman Mailer

“Writers block is only a failure of the ego.”

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

“Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207”

“The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture”

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of h...”

“Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.”

“No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a ...”

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

“The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating...”

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. ”

“You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.”

“I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron s...”

“I won't stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey're too agreeable,it's a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.”

“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.”

“Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.”

“I dont trust compliments. Ive been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didnt. But generally when people give you compliments theres one of two things wrong with them. Eith...”

“I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.”

“I tell you, say the rich,the poor are naughtbut dirty windwelling in air-shaftsover the cindersand droppings ofthe past, theirvoices thickwith greaseand ordure,sewer-greedto corrode the earwith the...”

“Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.”

“Boredom slays more of existence than war.”