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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
Thinking
People
Surgeons
Happiest
Paid
Cutting
Told
Happiness
Earth

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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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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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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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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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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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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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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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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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