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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

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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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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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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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
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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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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Norman Mailer
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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer