Norman Mailer Quotes

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.

two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.

Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.

Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.

I wanted to write a play about double nature ... one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with

I feel that everyone has a Hulk inside, and each of our Hulks is both scary and, potentially, pleasurable. That's the scariest thing about them.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.

We are all several different people. There are different aspects of our nature that are competing.

Your best friend and worst enemy are both in this room right now. It's not your neighbor right or left - and it's not God or the devil - it's you.

Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we'll become completely dark.

I was never more alive than when the Dark Passenger was driving.

Sometimes I think my soul is full of weeds!

The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.

Something stirred beneath my skin, some being inside I'd only suspected existed, demon or angel, I couldn't say.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.

You are good when you are one with yourself. Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil. For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house. And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.