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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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
Closest
Books
Ever
Book
Come
Writing
Men
Childbearing

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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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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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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.
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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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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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
Norman Mailer
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
Norman Mailer
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
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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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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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
Norman Mailer