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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

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
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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England
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Fall
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Shakespeare

More quotes by 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.
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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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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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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.
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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.
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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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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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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 think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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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.
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