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

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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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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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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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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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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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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 function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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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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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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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
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