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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
Men
Principles
Evil
Easy
True
Even
Always

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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
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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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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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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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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
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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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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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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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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 sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
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