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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
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Read
Flattening
Times
Rarely
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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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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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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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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As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
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Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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God is a creator, not a law giver.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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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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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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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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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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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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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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