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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

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
Serious
Story
Stories
Writing
Believe
Telling
Unless
Writer
Fiction

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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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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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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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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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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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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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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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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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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
Norman Mailer