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
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.
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.
I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
The true religion of America has always been America.
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.