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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Film Director
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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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Worse
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Probably
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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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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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all 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.
Norman Mailer
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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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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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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer