Quote

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

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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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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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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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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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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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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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.
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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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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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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
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