A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.

Address on "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation" at the University of California at Berkeley. Quoted in TIME magazine - 6 November 1972, which also reported that at the close of his address: Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."

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When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

On Tough Guys Don't Dance. Quoted in The New York Times - 8 June 1984.

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You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.

D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? - 1967

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Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.

The Naked and the Dead - 1948.

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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 of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly.' I just thought - this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is - I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used."

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 in A.A. lives with a drunk. I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred - because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right - when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.

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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

Newsweek - 22 October 1984.

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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

"Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 - 1959. Republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer - 1988 edited by J. Michael Lennon.

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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 that but don't admit it.

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'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.

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

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