- Movie making is like sex. You start doing it, and then you get interested in getting better at it.
- 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.
- "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).
- You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
- Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
- You know, a criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.
- [on his stabbing of his second-wife Adele Morales with a 3-in. pocket-knife] What have I held on to for a long, long time and never written about, and indeed...may never write about? And it seems to me that stabbing my wife, Adele, is probably what I will never write about.
- I've always felt my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry by it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it.
- Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
- Every writer has something to be ashamed of.
- [responding to a request for a literary contribution] Dear Pearl Kazin: I'm still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit that you print in 'Harper's Bazaar'.
- [on Ryan O'Neal] I didn't get that mad when he called me a jerk, because there was a certain truth to it.
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