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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.

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
Easy
True
Even
Always
Men
Principles
Evil

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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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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.
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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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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.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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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.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
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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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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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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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