Norman Mailer

“Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.”

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

“I think it is the function of the artist to invent the future.”

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

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

“Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.”

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”

“Writing books is the only real last thing left.”

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

“The first law of bureaucracy is to guarantee its own continuance.”

“The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

“There is a strain of loneliness infecting many Americans, which comes from disillusionment and alienation, an uncertainty of who they are and where they are going.”

“It is the novelist's obsession with the fantastic that allows him to write what is real.”

“With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your own soul, emitted in solitude.”

“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.”

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

“An artist must be brave.”