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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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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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.
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I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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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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...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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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer