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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
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
Would
Ought
Exception
Philosophy
Clock
Working
Suppose
Universe
Wrote
Else
Finally
Maugham
Thought
Somewhere
Somerset
Better
Along
Elaborate
Take
Nobody
Carried

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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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.
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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 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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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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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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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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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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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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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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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
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A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman Mailer
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
Norman Mailer
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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