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

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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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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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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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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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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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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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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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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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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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