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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

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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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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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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
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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 difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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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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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
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