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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
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Become
Sanity
Mind
Quick
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Hold
Impossible
Secret
Combinations
Literature
Maximum
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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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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
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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.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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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.
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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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.
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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
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