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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
Spirit
Invariably
Liberal
Suicide
Murder
Terror
Private
Violence
More quotes by Norman Mailer
You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
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
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
Norman Mailer
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
Norman Mailer
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
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
