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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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Film Director
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Journalist
Novelist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Book
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
Norman Mailer
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Norman Mailer
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I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer
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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
Norman Mailer
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Norman Mailer
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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
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer
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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer