Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, film-maker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II—more than any other post-war American writer. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him early and wide renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as the National Book Award. May these Norman Mailer Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. ” Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion, faith in the power of words.” Norman Mailer
2. “The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.” Norman Mailer
3. “Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.” Norman Mailer
4. “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.” Norman Mailer
5. “The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.” Norman Mailer
6. “A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.” Norman Mailer
7. “The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.” Norman Mailer
8. “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.” Norman Mailer
9. “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” Norman Mailer
10. “Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.” Norman Mailer
11. “Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.” Norman Mailer
12. “The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.” Norman Mailer
13. “We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.” Norman Mailer
14. “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.” Norman Mailer
15. “Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon.” Norman Mailer
16. “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.” Norman Mailer
17. “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.” Norman Mailer
18. “Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart.” Norman Mailer
19. “Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.” Norman Mailer
20. “Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.” Norman Mailer
21. “Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” Norman Mailer
22. “Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.” Norman Mailer
23. “We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.” Norman Mailer
24. “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.” Norman Mailer
25. “With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.” Norman Mailer
26. “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
27. “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.” Norman Mailer
28. “The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.” Norman Mailer
29. “As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.” Norman Mailer
30. “The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.” Norman Mailer
31. “Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.” Norman Mailer
32. “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.” Norman Mailer
33. “Somewhere, something incredible happened in history – the wrong guys won.” Norman Mailer
34. “I’ve made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.” Norman Mailer
35. “Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.” Norman Mailer
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