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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

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
Existence
Slays
War
Twentieth
Underlying
Nothingness
Boredom
Illness
Blessing
Century

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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.
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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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.
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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.
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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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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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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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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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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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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.
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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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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.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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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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