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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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
Anxiety
Role
Roles
Century
Literature
Natural
Men
Twentieth

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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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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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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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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.
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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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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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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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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.
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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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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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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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