Norman Mailer Quotes - Page 8

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• You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

  Norman Mailer

  Men, Effectiveness, You Like It

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.82, Henry Holt and Company

  8 Copy quote

• While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

  Norman Mailer

  New York, Book, Long

  Source: www.esquire.com

  4 Copy quote

• People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

  Norman Mailer

  Crazy, People, Democracy

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.

  Norman Mailer

  People, Democracy, Goes On

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

  Norman Mailer

  Cancer, Profit, Crisis

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• The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

  Norman Mailer

  Relationship, Boyfriend, Beautiful

  Norman Mailer (1973). “Marilyn: A Biography”, New York : Grosset & Dunlap

  20 Copy quote

• Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

  Norman Mailer

  Running, Law, Get Better

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman Mailer

  Sex, Years, Making Love

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• And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

  Norman Mailer

  God, Time, Sex

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Deer Park: A Novel”, p.368, Random House

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• There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.

  Norman Mailer

  Inspirational, Bad Day, Able

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• In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

  Norman Mailer

  Blow, America, Cells

  1963 The Presidential Papers,'Fourth Presidential Paper'.

  8 Copy quote

• Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

  Norman Mailer

  Stories, Newspapers, Injured

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• The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

  Norman Mailer

  Promise, Guilt, Nausea

  4 Copy quote

• ...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

  Norman Mailer

  Rejection, Desire, Doctrine

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• I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

  Norman Mailer

  Artist, Style, Actors

  Norman Mailer (1992). “Advertisements for Myself”, p.18, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.

  Norman Mailer

  Italian, Men, Palaces

  4 Copy quote

• A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.

  Norman Mailer

  War, Fighting, Army

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.174, Henry Holt and Company

  4 Copy quote

• MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

  Norman Mailer

  Honesty, Writing, Unexpected

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• 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.

  Norman Mailer

  Courage, Ambition, Men

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• I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

  Norman Mailer

  Humility, Men, Thinking

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• Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

  Norman Mailer

  Philosophy, Clock, Exception

  NORMAN MAILER (1955). “THE DEER PARK”

  4 Copy quote

• The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

  Norman Mailer

  Believe, Thinking, World

  Norman Mailer (1992). “Advertisements for Myself”, p.184, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Norman Mailer

  Long, Grace, Cosmos

  1991 In The Guardian, 5 Oct.

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• Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

  Norman Mailer

  Los Angeles, Plastic, Constellations

  1969 Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

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• We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.

  Norman Mailer

  Two, Soul, Division

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