Norman Mailer

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.

For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be _x000D_ prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.

Culture is worth a little risk.

We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

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.

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

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.

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.