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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

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
Came
Religion
Comfortless
Love
Anxieties
Reward
Believed
Rewards
Anxiety

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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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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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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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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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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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 take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
Norman Mailer
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
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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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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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