Quote

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

Norman Mailer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Human
Answer
Humans
Activity
Never
Coming
Single
Question
Answers
Keep
Wasteful
Back
Obsession

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
Image
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
Image
Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
Norman Mailer
Image
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
Norman Mailer
Image
The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
Norman Mailer
Image
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
Image
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
Image
A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman Mailer
Image
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer
Image
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
Norman Mailer
Image
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
Image
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Norman Mailer
Image
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
Image
The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
Norman Mailer