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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

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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
Anything
Effect
May
York
Book
Effects
Long
Style
Term
Working
Read
Flattening
Times
Rarely

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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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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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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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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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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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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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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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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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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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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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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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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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