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

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
Norman Mailer
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
Norman Mailer
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
Norman Mailer
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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
Norman Mailer
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
Norman Mailer
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
Norman Mailer
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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer