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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Journalist
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New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Death
Dread
Psychology
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Perception
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York
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Magic
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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You have the right to speak your mind.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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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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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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