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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
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Human
Answer
Humans
Activity
Never
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Single
Question
Answers
Keep
Wasteful
Back
Obsession

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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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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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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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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