Norman Mailer
157 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."
"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."
"The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture"
"Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207"
"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."
"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."
"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."
"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
"You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip."
"This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam."
"There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce."
"Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough."
"The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television."
"The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation."
"What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?"
"[The launch of Apollo 11]: For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames.<br/><br/>No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville's Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville's Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound.<br/><br/>Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, 'Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!' but not his voice, almost like the Italian girl saying fenomenal, and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears, hot in all the intimacy of a forming of heat, as if one's ear were in the caldron of a the vast burning of air, heavens of oxygen being born and consumed in this ascension of the rocket, and a poor moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God – the fire was white as a torch and long as the rocket itself, a tail of fire, a face, yes now the rocket looked like a thin and pointed witch's hat, and the flames from its base were the blazing eyes of the witch. Forked like saw teeth was the base of the flame which quivered through the lens of the binoculars. Upwards. As the rocket keened over and went up and out to sea, one could no longer watch its stage, only the flame from its base. Now it seemed to rise like a ball of fire, like a new sun mounting the sky, a flame elevating itself.<br/><br/> [...] Now, through the public address system, came the sound of Armstrong talking to Launch Control. He was quieter than anyone else. 'Inboard cutoff' he said with calm in his voice."
"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube."
"The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you."
"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul."
"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."
"I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension."
"Culture is worth a little risk."
"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."