There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. – Norman Mailer
Theres 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. – Norman Mailer
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil. – Norman Mailer
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs. – Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. – Norman Mailer
There are four stages in a marriage. First theres the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce. – Norman Mailer
Its not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions. – Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. – Norman Mailer
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. – Norman Mailer
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. – Norman Mailer
I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood. – Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. – Norman Mailer
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. – Norman Mailer
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence. – Norman Mailer
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body – it just wears it out. – Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. – Norman Mailer
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. – Norman Mailer
