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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.

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
Knowing
Greater
Wrong
Upon
Crashes
Right
Impotence
Like
Crash
World
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Wave

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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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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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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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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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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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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 Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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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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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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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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