"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."
— Norman Mailer

"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

"There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night."
— Norman Mailer

"Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war."
— Norman Mailer

"The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent."
— Norman Mailer

"The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste."
— Norman Mailer

"There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."
— Norman Mailer

"Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."
— Norman Mailer

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens the Devils to contest his vision."
— Norman Mailer

"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."
— Norman Mailer

"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. "
— Norman Mailer

"Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon"
— Norman Mailer (Harlot's Ghost)

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing"
— Norman Mailer

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."
— Norman Mailer

"Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart"
— Norman Mailer (The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel)

"I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory."
— Norman Mailer

"I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind"
— Norman Mailer (The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel)

"Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
"
— Norman Mailer

"We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it."
— Norman Mailer (In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison)

""Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.""
— Norman Mailer

"There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."
— Norman Mailer

"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."
— Norman Mailer

"America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption."
— Norman Mailer

"Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.
p.207"
— Norman Mailer (The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America)

"Mr. Everytime U see mE gOt a nEw ChAin"
— Norman Mailer

"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 (The Naked and the Dead)

"On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I’m concerned. Liberalism depends all too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover, liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since I happen to be—I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects—but I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal’s mind is blown. He is consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end of real conversation."
— Norman Mailer