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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

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
Means
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Real
Mean
Writing
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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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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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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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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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 a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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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.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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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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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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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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