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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
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Real
Mean
Writing
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
Norman Mailer
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
Norman Mailer
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
Norman Mailer
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
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A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman Mailer
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
Norman Mailer
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
Norman Mailer