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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

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
Small
Winning
Masculinity
Given
Battles
Something
Gain
Men
Gains
Battle
Honor
Sports

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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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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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
Norman Mailer
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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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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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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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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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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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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.
Norman Mailer
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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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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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
Norman Mailer