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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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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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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 hate everything which is not in myself.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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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.
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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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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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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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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
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