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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

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
Existentialism
Legendary
Philosophy
Makes
Children
Kind

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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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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.
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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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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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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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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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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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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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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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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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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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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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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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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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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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