Tom Walker > Tom's Quotes

“Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.”
― Norman Mailer

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”
― Norman Mailer

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”
― 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

“You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.”
― Norman Mailer

“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, Advertisements for Myself

“I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.”
― Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation

“The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.”
― Norman Mailer