Norman Mailer
Novelist
1923-01-31
Quotes by Norman Mailer
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We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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I won't stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey're too agreeable,it's a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.
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I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. Beware, said the sound. Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth. What a rustling those first animals must have known.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.
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Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
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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.
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Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207
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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.
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The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
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Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
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Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Read quote -
We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
Read quote -
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
Read quote -
No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.
Read quote -
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
Read quote