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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.

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
Dissatisfaction
Design
Ever
Right
World

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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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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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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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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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.
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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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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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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