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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
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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Tough
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Literature
Read
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Ever
Wince
Book
Dance
Writing
Guys

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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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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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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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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.
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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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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.
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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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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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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.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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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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