Quote

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

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
Unimportant
Conformity
Makes
Find
Never
Tick

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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
God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
Image
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
Norman Mailer
Image
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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
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
Image
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
Image
People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
Norman Mailer
Image
I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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
Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
Image
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Norman Mailer
Image
I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
Norman Mailer
Image
The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
Norman Mailer
Image
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
Image
The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
Image
It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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
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