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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
Right
World
Dissatisfaction
Design
Ever

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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A high church for the true mediocre.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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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.
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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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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Norman Mailer
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer