More Norman Mailer Quotations

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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.
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvellous and awful, good and evil.

Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. Norman Mailer

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the

creative act. It discharges the tension