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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
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Film Director
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Historian
Journalist
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Playwright
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Left
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Destroy
Life
Honor
Built
American
Masculinity

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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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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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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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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.
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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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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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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.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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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.
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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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