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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
Principles
Evil
Easy
True
Even
Always
Men

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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
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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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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.
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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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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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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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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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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 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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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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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.
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