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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

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
Sentiments
Actions
Literature
History
Action
Make
Men

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
Norman Mailer
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
Norman Mailer
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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
Norman Mailer
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
Norman Mailer
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer