Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

You don`t know a woman until you`ve met her in court.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

Making a film is a cross between a circus, a military campaign, a nightmare, and orgy and a high.

Great writers are not easy to read, and shouldn`t be.

You know, a criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.

I sometimes think that if porny films had come along when I was a young man, it would have dispensed with a lot of friction in my personal life. (in a conversation with his son, John Buffalo Mailer in Playboy`s Dec. 2004 issue).

One thing I`ve learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don`t feel it; there`s probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

Every moment of one`s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

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

Movie making is like sex. You start doing it, and then you get interested in getting better at it.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment. It`s the exact opposite of capitalism. In capitalism you want your business to succeed, and to the degree it does your energy increases, and you go out and buy an even bigger business. In writing it`s almost the exact opposite. You just want to keep the store going. You`re not going to do as well this year as last year probably, but nonetheless let`s keep the store going. What ruins most writers of talent is that they don`t get enough experience, so their novels tend to develop a certain paranoid perfection.