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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.
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
Moving
Understand
Crippled
War
Comprehend
History
Forward
Past
Therefore
Something
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Move
People
Future
More quotes by Norman Mailer
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
God is a creator, not a law giver.
Norman Mailer
Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.
Norman Mailer
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
Norman Mailer
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
A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
Norman Mailer
Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
Norman Mailer
When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
Norman Mailer
...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
Norman Mailer
To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
Norman Mailer
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
