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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
Paid
Cutting
Told
Happiness
Earth
Thinking
People
Surgeons
Happiest

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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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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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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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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
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I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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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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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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