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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
Sweat
Hour
Hours
Words
Wreck
Body
Wrecks
Writing
Chair
Chairs
Guts

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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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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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Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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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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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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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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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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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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