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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

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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
Looks
Cities
Strongest
Oncoming
Believe
Simply
Teeth
Fiscal
Always
Fighting
Eight
Demise
Would
Eye
Crisis
Suggests
People
Times
None
Barely
Part
York
Knock
Best
Terrible
Begun
Look
Fight
Vital

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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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.
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There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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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.
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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.
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
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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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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
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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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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Norman Mailer