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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

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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
Four
Cynical
Woman
Fourth
Cannot
Divorce
Firsts
Affair
Without
Finally
First
Marriage
Children
Stage
Literature
Stages

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I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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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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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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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.
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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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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