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.

— Norman Mailer

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known.

— Norman Mailer

I met Jack Kennedy in November 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.

— Norman Mailer

I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 percent good and 35 percent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 percent good, 46 percent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 percent bad and 40 percent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?" Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

— Norman Mailer

I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naught but dirty indwelling in air-shafts over the cinder sand droppings of the past, their voices thick with grease and ordure, sewer-greedto corrode the herewith the horrors of the pa stand the voids of new stupidity. One could drown waiting for the Porto make one fine distinction. Yes, destroy essay the Richard you lose the roots of God.

— Norman Mailer

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

— Norman Mailer

It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.

— Norman Mailer

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer anymore.

— Norman Mailer