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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.

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
Five
Start
Times
Money
Book
Writing
Always
Married

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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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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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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Norman Mailer
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
Norman Mailer
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
Norman Mailer
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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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