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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.

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
Wall
Trumpet
Small
Trumpets
Literature
Defiance
Artist
Conformity
Power
Walls
Must
Exists
Every
Blow
Pride

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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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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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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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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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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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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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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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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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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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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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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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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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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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