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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

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
Best
Subordinates
Work
Ladder
Every
Ladders
Make
Functions
Men
Frightened
Army
Function
Contemptuous
Fear
Fitted

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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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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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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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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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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
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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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