Norman Mailer quotes Born: 01/31/1923 Country: usa

• America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind. (Norman Mailer) [america/people/sound]
• 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) [lawyer]
• A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. (Norman Mailer) [democracy/tyranny/borders]
• 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. (Norman Mailer) [day/more/print/television]
• Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. (Norman Mailer) [life/destroy/men]
• In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. (Norman Mailer) [america/people/willpower/trust]
• Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs. (Norman Mailer)
• Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child. (Norman Mailer) [child]
• Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. (Norman Mailer) [newspaper/facts]
• I usually need a can of beer to prime me. (Norman Mailer) [beer]
• 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) [minority/group/evil]
• Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. (Norman Mailer)
• The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. (Norman Mailer) [horror]
• 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. (Norman Mailer) [difference/being/television/difference]
• Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle. (Norman Mailer) [giant]
• There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be. (Norman Mailer) [sex/willpower]
• There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. (Norman Mailer) [horror/life/democracy/literary style]
• The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. (Norman Mailer) [art/consciousness/people]
• Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. (Norman Mailer) [more/more/willpower/creation]
• Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. (Norman Mailer) [books/men]
• In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell. (Norman Mailer) [america/spirit/experts]

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