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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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Film Director
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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Never
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Question
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Keep
Wasteful
Back
Obsession
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Answer
Humans
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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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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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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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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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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