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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.

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
Built
Masculinity
American
Manhood
Left
Masculine
Certain
Tendency
Littles
Tendencies
Little
Destroy
Men
Life
Honor

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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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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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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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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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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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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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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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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