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

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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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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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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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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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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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...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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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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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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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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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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