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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
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Film Director
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Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
May
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Effects
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More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
Norman Mailer
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
Norman Mailer
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
Norman Mailer
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
Norman Mailer
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer