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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

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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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
Norman Mailer
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
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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
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
Norman Mailer
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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
Norman Mailer
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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
Norman Mailer
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
Norman Mailer
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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
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer