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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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Wasteful
Back
Obsession
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Humans
Activity
Never
Coming
Single
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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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