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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
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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Men
Twentieth
Anxiety
Role
Roles
Century
Literature
Natural

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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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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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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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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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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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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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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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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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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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