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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.

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
Hours
Words
Wreck
Body
Wrecks
Writing
Chair
Chairs
Guts
Sweat
Hour

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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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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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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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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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
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When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
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