Quote

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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
Anxiety
Role
Roles
Century
Literature
Natural
Men
Twentieth

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
Norman Mailer
Image
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
Norman Mailer
Image
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
Image
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
Image
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer
Image
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer
Image
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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
I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
Norman Mailer
Image
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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
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
For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
Image
Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
Norman Mailer
Image
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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
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
Image
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer