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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
Primitive
Giants
Hips
Wise
Literature
Sophistication
Jungle
Giant

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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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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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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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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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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
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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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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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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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