Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Mailer

Mailer’s line lands like a barstool proverb sharpened into a weapon: funny, mean, and revealing in what it assumes about who gets to write and at what cost. “Alimony” isn’t just a legal obligation here; it’s the invoice that arrives when the romance of the artist’s life collides with the paperwork of adulthood. By calling it “the curse,” Mailer frames domestic consequence as a kind of supernatural punishment visited on the “writing class,” as if novelists are a guild with its own special suffering - not the mundane burdens everyone else carries, but a uniquely artistic affliction.

The subtext is less about family law than about entitlement. Alimony presumes a past bargain: one partner’s labor (often unpaid, often feminized) enabling the other’s career, followed by a reckoning when the marriage ends. Mailer flips that reckoning into grievance, turning support into sabotage: money that might have financed time, risk, and ego now gets diverted to responsibility. The joke depends on a familiar masculine mythology of the writer as a man who needs freedom, disorder, and sexual latitude to produce work - and then resents the bill for the wreckage.

Context matters: Mailer’s era treated the Great Male Novelist as a public institution and wives as backstage infrastructure. Alimony threatened that arrangement by attaching a price to the “genius” lifestyle. The line works because it’s both self-mythologizing and self-incriminating: an attempt to make a personal consequence sound like a collective artistic tragedy, while accidentally spotlighting the hidden economy that made the writing class possible in the first place.