Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Mailer

Heroism, for Mailer, isn’t clean valor or civic virtue; it’s blasphemous ambition with consequences. “Argue with the gods” casts the hero not as a dutiful servant of fate but as someone arrogant enough to challenge the terms of reality itself. That’s a novelist’s idea of greatness: the refusal to accept limits, the insistence that the world can be rewritten. Mailer’s verb choice matters. You don’t “defy” the gods in a single gesture; you argue with them, as if the universe were a courtroom and your ego had standing.

The line’s darker engine is the second half: creation as a haunted house. Achievement doesn’t just attract envy; it conjures opposition, internal and external, and not in a tidy moralistic way. “Awakens devils” suggests that large visions generate their own antagonists: political backlash, interpersonal wreckage, the corrupting compromises required to make anything real. The devil “inhabit[s] a part of his creation” is the key admission. Mailer isn’t warning about temptation as an outside force; he’s saying the rot can be structural, baked into the thing you build.

Contextually, this fits Mailer’s postwar obsession with masculinity, power, and the erotic charge of domination - along with his suspicion that greatness and damage travel together. It’s also a veiled self-portrait: the artist as swaggering insurgent who knows his work (and his legend) will carry collateral harm, and keeps writing anyway.