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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
Courage
Talent
Scheme
Worst
Schemes
Probably
Cowardice
Firsts
Nearly
Everything
Dull
First
Rate
Things
Works

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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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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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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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 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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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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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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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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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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