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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

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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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
First
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Courage
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Worst
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Probably
Cowardice
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Dull

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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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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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 is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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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.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
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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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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
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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.
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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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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