Quote

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

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
Ability
Grasp
Become
Sanity
Mind
Quick
Combination
Hold
Impossible
Secret
Combinations
Literature
Maximum

More quotes by 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 sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
Norman Mailer
Image
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
Image
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
Norman Mailer
Image
Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
Image
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
Image
Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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
Image
Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
Norman Mailer
Image
When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
Norman Mailer
Image
To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
Norman Mailer
Image
Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
Norman Mailer
Image
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
Image
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
Image
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
Norman Mailer
Image
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
Image
I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
Image
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Norman Mailer