Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. - Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. - Norman Mailer
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. - Norman Mailer
At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind. - Norman Mailer
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
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war. - Norman Mailer
One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that. - Norman Mailer
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court. - Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. - Norman Mailer
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. - Norman Mailer
There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. - Norman Mailer
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
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture - Norman Mailer
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego. - Norman Mailer
Boredom slays more of existence than war. - 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