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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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
Nightmare
Worse
Gets
Democracy
Ends
Every
Totalitarian
More quotes by Norman Mailer
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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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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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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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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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.
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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.
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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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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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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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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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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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While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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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.
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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.
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