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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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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
Norman Mailer
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
Norman Mailer
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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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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.
Norman Mailer
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer