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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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Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Book
Novelists
Great
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Wild
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Beauty
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
Norman Mailer
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
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Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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
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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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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
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
Norman Mailer