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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
Twentieth
Anxiety
Role
Roles
Century
Literature
Natural
Men

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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
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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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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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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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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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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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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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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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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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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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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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