Norman Mailer Quotes

There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other — where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.'

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. Every time I get...

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it....

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV - 1998 - First broadcast on French and US television in October 2000. Quoted in "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, in The New York Times - 4 October 2000.

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It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man - I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with...

Norman Mailer

TIME interview - 1991 - "His Punch Is Better Than Ever" by Bonnie Angelo in TIME magazine - 30 September 1991.

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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...

Norman Mailer

TIME interview - 1991 - "His Punch Is Better Than Ever" by Bonnie Angelo in TIME magazine - 30 September 1991.

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