Norman Mailer

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

“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.”

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

“No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.”

“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.”

“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”

“Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.”

“The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture”

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

“Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.”

“The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

“Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.”

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

“Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.”

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

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

“I won't stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey're too agreeable,it's a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.”

“When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.”

“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.”

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