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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

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
Never
Tick
Unimportant
Conformity
Makes
Find

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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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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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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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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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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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.
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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
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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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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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