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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
Writer
Means
Able
Real
Mean
Writing
Work

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
Norman Mailer
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
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People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
Norman Mailer
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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
Norman Mailer
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
Norman Mailer
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
Norman Mailer
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer