Quote

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

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
Men
Rings
Sport
Vain
Physical
Humiliated
Activity
Attract
Therefore
Ring
Gets
Admiration
Sports
Boxing

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer
Image
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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
We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
Image
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
Norman Mailer
Image
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
Norman Mailer
Image
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Norman Mailer
Image
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
Image
Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
Norman Mailer
Image
I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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 met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
Norman Mailer
Image
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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
A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman Mailer
Image
I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
Image
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
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
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Norman Mailer
Image
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer