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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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Essayist
Film Director
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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
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Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Combination
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Impossible
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Combinations
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Sanity
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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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.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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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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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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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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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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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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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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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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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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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.
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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.
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