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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

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
Truth
Prevarication
Like
Reflexive
Sturdy
Reliable
Honesty
Soon
Habit
Becomes

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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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You have the right to speak your mind.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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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.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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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.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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.
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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.
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You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
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