Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer

American Author, Novelist, Journalist, Poet, Playwright, Screenwriter and Film Director

"The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another."

"The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war."

"Each day a few more lies eat into the seed 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."

"Television pollutes identity."

"Money bears the same relation to social solutions that water does to blood."

"The working class is loyal to friends, not ideas."

"The greatest myths are never divorced from our deepest sense of reality – the primitive knowledge with which we are born. That kind of knowledge we are able to sense despite all the barriers of our modern development."

"There was that law of life so cruel and so just - that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same."

"The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it."

"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."

"The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture."

"There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

"The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste."

"You don't know a woman until you've met her in court."

"Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."

"The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent."

"Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way."

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

"The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul."

"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."

"On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I’m concerned. Liberalism depends all too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover, liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since I happen to be—I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects—but I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal’s mind is blown. He is consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end of real conversation."

"No heart is so hard as the timid heart."

"The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety."

"Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind."

"America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption."

"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."

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

"We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches--the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small--the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia--life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam."

"The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today.... We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination."

"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."

"With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance."

"We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods."

"Culture is worth a little risk."

"The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation."

"To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates."

"What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war."

"The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical."

"Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered."

"We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything."

"We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?"

"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."

"Alimony is the curse of the writing class."

"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."

"We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again."

"There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements."

"Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor."

"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be."

"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."

"It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist. And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words."

"Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since ‘War and Peace.’ On the other hand I also thought, ‘I don’t know anything about writing. I’m virtually an impostor.’"