Norman Mailer Quotes

I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics – this is very selfish of me, but who cares – what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.

I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction … that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn’t learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn’t like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.

I really gave up being passionate about politics 10, 15, 20 years ago, because I think finally that there were forces in the country that are larger than politics itself. And so I find it a fascinating game, this wonderful stuff goes on in terms of watching the game. But If you get to down it, look, I`m going to root for someone, I`ll root at a football game, not for politicians.

There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

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.

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

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.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

What’s not realized about good novelists is that they’re as competitive as good athletes. They study each other – where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don’t admit it.