Quote

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

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
Power
Pornography
World
Finds
Towards
Sex
Sort
Powerful
Subterranean
Half
Impetus
Business
Advertisements

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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
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
When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
Image
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
Image
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer
Image
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
Norman Mailer
Image
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
Image
There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
Image
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
Image
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer
Image
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
Image
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
Image
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
Norman Mailer
Image
I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
Norman Mailer
Image
Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
Image
Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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