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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
Invariably
Liberal
Suicide
Murder
Terror
Private
Violence
Spirit

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
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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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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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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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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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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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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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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.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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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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