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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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Film Director
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Journalist
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Playwright
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Screenwriter
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Death
Dread
Psychology
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Perception
Inconsiderable
Roots
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Motivation
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York
Existential
Magic
Professors
More quotes by Norman Mailer
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
Norman Mailer
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Norman Mailer
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
Norman Mailer
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
Norman Mailer
I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
Norman Mailer
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
Norman Mailer
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Norman Mailer
