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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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
Art
Become
Character
Real
Artless
Writing
Arrive
Characters
Novel
Point
More quotes by Norman Mailer
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
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
For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
Norman Mailer
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
Norman Mailer
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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
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.
Norman Mailer
God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
