Quote

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

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
Little
Tendencies
Men
Destroy
Life
Honor
Built
American
Masculinity
Left
Manhood
Certain
Masculine
Littles
Tendency

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
Image
A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
Norman Mailer
Image
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
Image
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
Image
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
Image
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.
Norman Mailer
Image
No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
Image
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
Norman Mailer
Image
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer
Image
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer
Image
As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
Norman Mailer
Image
The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
Image
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
Norman Mailer
Image
God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
Image
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
Norman Mailer
Image
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
Norman Mailer
Image
A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman Mailer
Image
If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
Norman Mailer