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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
Told
Happiness
Earth
Thinking
People
Surgeons
Happiest
Paid
Cutting

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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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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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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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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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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
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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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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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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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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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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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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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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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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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