“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.”
And
“Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.”
And
“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.
And
“Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”
And
“There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”
And
“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.”
And
“Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that “Nobody is any better than he ought to be.”… I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.” The Deer Park, 1955
And
“The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
And
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
And
“With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”
And
“His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.”
And
“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
And
“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.”
And
“There are four stages to marriage. First there’s the affair, then there’s the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”
And
“We think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”
And
“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.”
And
“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.”
And
“I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.”
And
“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.”
And
“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one’s private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”
And
“There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”
And
“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.”
And
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
Harry Hubbard, in Harlot’s Ghost : A Novel (1991)
And
“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person…. They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”
Kittredge Gardiner, in Harlot’s Ghost : A Novel (1991)
And
“I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.”
Harry Hubbard, in Harlot’s Ghost : A Novel (1991)
And
“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one’s private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”
And
“There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.”
And
“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.”
And
“Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.”
And
“Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There’s no reason to receive a reward if you’re 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That’s almost impossible to contemplate.”
And
“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.”
Wikipedia Page: Norman Mailer
