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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

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
Maggots
Long
Aspirin
Civilization
Lasts
Last
Sense
Night
Back

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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
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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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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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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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What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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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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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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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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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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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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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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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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