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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
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
Make
Learned
Love
Probably
Nothing
Feel
Feels
Thing
Years
Worse
Really
Sex

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
Norman Mailer
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
Norman Mailer
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
Norman Mailer
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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
Norman Mailer
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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
Norman Mailer