Norman Mailer Quotes

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about.

Writing was far more of an art in the sports world than it is now.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.