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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
Story
Stories
Writing
Believe
Telling
Unless
Writer
Fiction
Serious

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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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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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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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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.
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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 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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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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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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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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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 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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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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