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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
Men
Childbearing
Closest
Books
Ever
Book
Come
Writing

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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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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.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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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.
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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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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit 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.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
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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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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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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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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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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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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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