Norman Mailer Quotes

I don't write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I'd get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.

I'm not very good at being a wife because I break all the rules.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.

You throw the kitchen sink at your early books. You put everything in there. It's like when you meet a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you tell them all your best stories. By the time you have been married for 10 years, they are crying, 'Shut up!'

It's volatile, the marriage. Which one isn't? Nothing better than a good, full-on row. Get it all out. Say rude and nasty things. And then be sorry. Genuinely sorry, afterwards.

Interpreting anyone's marriage - a neighbor's, let alone the president's - is extremely difficult.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.

No one knows what a marriage is like except the two people in it - and sometimes one of them doesn't know.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

As soon as you say 'I do,' you'll discover that marriage is like a car. Both of you might be sitting in the front seat, but only one of you is driving. And most marriages are more like a motorcycle than a car. Somebody has to sit in the back, and you have to yell just to be heard.

Joe DiMaggio was quite mean to Marilyn Monroe when they were married. But after she died, he did tend to her grave, which made up for it.

People forget that I was married. I love that, Will he get married? I don't talk about it because I don't think about it. I don't ever question other peoples' versions of how they live their lives or what they do.

In private I'm not. You will have to ask my wife. She maintains I'm a fluffy husband.

I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.

A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

When you're a creative person and you create art with other people, whether you're married to them or not, you're going to run into creative conflicts. If you're a couple, certain inhibitions and barriers are gone. I have those barriers with other people, but I don't have them with my wife.

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.

My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.

I've always been someone who's kept my private life a little private. When there's a ring on my finger, I'll talk about it.

For a woman to be at once a coquette and a bigot is more than the humblest of husbands can bear; she should mercifully choose between the two.

My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed - and each of the five has been me.

Communication is the root of marital success from which a strong union can grow, and noncommunicatio n is the rock on which the ship will bash out her keel.