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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.

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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Film Director
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Journalist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Life
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Depths
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Trifle
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Barry
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Pointless
Goldwater

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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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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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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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 difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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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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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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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.
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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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.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer