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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

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
Sophistication
Jungle
Giant
Primitive
Giants
Hips
Wise

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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
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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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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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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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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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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.
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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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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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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A high church for the true mediocre.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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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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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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