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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

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
Suicide
Murder
Terror
Private
Violence
Spirit
Invariably
Liberal

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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 only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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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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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
Norman Mailer
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
Norman Mailer
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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