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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
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
Even
Final
People
Finals
Necessary
Consciousness
Moral
Purpose
Artist
Exacerbate
Art
Intensify

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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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.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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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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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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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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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.
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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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