“I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“And so I ask, “Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?” But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, “Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer–war, and the preparations for new war.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“This is D.J., Disc Jockey to American turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Destiny
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The novelist … must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; hemust think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder…. The Army functions best when you’re frightenedof the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Fear
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”
Norman Mailer
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Photography
