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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

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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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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Suppose
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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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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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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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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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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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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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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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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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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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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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