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
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.
The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.
We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd. . . . Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste? . . . Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?