Norman Mailer Quotes

America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

Elegance and beauty have been banished.

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

We have turned away from the natural world. Instead, it's all about money and power.

Hatred makes us all ugly.

Right now, we do not act as a true society. We act as a world under terror, just scrambling to survive.

Beautiful. And ugly. The world is always both.

War, which used to be cruel and magnificent has now become cruel and squalid.

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing.

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.

The world didn’t like to look at the dark underside very often. But that didn’t change the ugliness; it only ensured that those who perpetuated the ugliness were left alone to kill and maim and rape.

What have we done to the world?....... Look what we've done.

I have the ugliest feet in the world. But even if I didn't dance, they would still be ugly. My toes are too big!

We're in a decaying culture now. Naturally, the young people in the culture are going to feel themselves to be products of the decay.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots.