NORMAN MAILER

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

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.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

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.

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.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.