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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
Able
Real
Mean
Writing
Work
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Means

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
Norman Mailer
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
Norman Mailer
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
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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
Norman Mailer
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
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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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
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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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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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Norman Mailer