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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Power
Come
Inherited
Profit
Cancer
Merely
Crisis
Soon

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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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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.
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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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.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
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Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
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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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.
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I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
Norman Mailer