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A high church for the true mediocre.

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
Syndicate
Mediocre
High
Church
True

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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.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.
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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 art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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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.
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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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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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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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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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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.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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