Quote

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

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
Person
Grow
Diminish
Human
Loses
Flavor
Humans
Grows
Reaction
Distaste
Must
Passion
Reactions
Shrink
Thing
Understanding
Curiosity
Weariness
Life
Point
Changes
Shrinks
Less
Interested
Fatal
Persons
Writer
Sympathetic

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
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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.
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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 become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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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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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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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
Norman Mailer
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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer