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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.
Norman Mailer
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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Film Director
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Novelist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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More quotes by Norman Mailer
To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
Norman Mailer
Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
Norman Mailer
The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
Norman Mailer
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
Norman Mailer
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
