Norman Mailer Quotes

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented: sometimes am I king; Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am: then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king'd again: and by and by Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be, Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing.

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

All in all is all we are.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

An Irishman can be worried by the consciousness that there is nothing to worry about.

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

At any given moment, I open my eyes and exist. And before that, during all eternity, what was there? Nothing.

All is vanity, look you; and so the preacher is vanity too.

I simply write what I want, wish, long to write.... The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.