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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
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Film Director
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Journalist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Something
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More quotes by 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.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
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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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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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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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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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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.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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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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