Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailerwas an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 January 1923
CityLong Branch, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.