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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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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
Literature
Read
Write
Ever
Wince
Book
Dance
Writing
Guys
Tough
Asks

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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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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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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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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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
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You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
Norman Mailer
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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
Norman Mailer
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
Norman Mailer
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
Norman Mailer