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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.

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
Absurd
Inspiring
Huge
Purpose
Think
Thinking
Immensity
Life
Shrink
Shrinks

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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
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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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People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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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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A high church for the true mediocre.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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