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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.

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
Earth
Thinking
People
Surgeons
Happiest
Paid
Cutting
Told
Happiness

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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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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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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 contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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A high church for the true mediocre.
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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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