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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
Habit
Becomes
Truth
Prevarication
Like
Reflexive
Sturdy
Reliable
Honesty
Soon

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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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.
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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.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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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.
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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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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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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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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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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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