Guess quote

Norman Mailer [1923-2007] American

Rank: 101
Novelist

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948.

Men, Marriage, Trust, Women

Quote	Tags	Rank
The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.	Men	101
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.	Men, Women	102
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.		103
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.		104
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.		105
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.		106
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.		107
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.		108
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.		109
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.		110
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.		111
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.		112
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.		113
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.		114
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.		115
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.		116
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.		117
We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.		118
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.		119
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.		120
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.		121
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.		122
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.	Trust	123
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.		124
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.		125
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.	Marriage	126
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.		201
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.		202
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.		203
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.		204
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.		205
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.		206
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.		207
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.		208
I hate everything which is not in myself.		209
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.		210
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.		211
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.		212
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.		213
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.		214
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.		215
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.		216
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.		217

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