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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
Books
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Book
Come
Writing
Men
Childbearing
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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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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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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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.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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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.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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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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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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.
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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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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