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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
Totalitarian
Nightmare
Worse
Gets
Democracy
Ends
Every

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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.
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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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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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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.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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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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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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To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
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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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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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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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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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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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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 women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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