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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Norman Mailer
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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
Comes
Enough
Long
Something
Cosmos
Forgiven
Novel
Grace
Start
More quotes by Norman Mailer
We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
Norman Mailer
Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
Norman Mailer
One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
Norman Mailer
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
Norman Mailer
You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
Norman Mailer
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
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
Norman Mailer
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
I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
Norman Mailer
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer
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
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
Norman Mailer
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
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
Norman Mailer
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
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
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
Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
Norman Mailer
