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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
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Film Director
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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Combination
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Impossible
Secret
Combinations
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Sanity
Mind
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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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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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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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.
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
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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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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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