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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
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
Talent
Scheme
Worst
Schemes
Probably
Cowardice
Firsts
Nearly
Everything
Dull
First
Rate
Things
Works
Courage
More quotes by Norman Mailer
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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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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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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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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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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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.
Norman Mailer
No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
