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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
Unless
Writer
Fiction
Serious
Story
Stories
Writing
Believe
Telling

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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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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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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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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've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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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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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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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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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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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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