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
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 his creation.
One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.
There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.
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.
If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.
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.
Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.
There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
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.