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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
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Working
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Flattening
Times
Rarely
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May
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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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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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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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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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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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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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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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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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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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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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A high church for the true mediocre.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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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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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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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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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.
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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