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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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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
People
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Consciousness
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Artist
Exacerbate
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Intensify
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
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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.
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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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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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I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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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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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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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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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.
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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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