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

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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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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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A high church for the true mediocre.
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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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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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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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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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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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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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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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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'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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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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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