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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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
Literature
Maximum
Ability
Grasp
Become
Sanity
Mind
Quick
Combination
Hold
Impossible
Secret
Combinations
More quotes by Norman Mailer
Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Norman Mailer
As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
Norman Mailer
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Norman Mailer
You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
Norman Mailer
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
Norman Mailer
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
Norman Mailer
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
Norman Mailer
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
Norman Mailer
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
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
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
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
God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
