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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.

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
Quick
Actor
Style
Actors
Artist
Switching
Trap
Become
Traps
Truth
Prince
Change

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
Norman Mailer
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Norman Mailer
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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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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
Norman Mailer
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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer
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There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
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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.
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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer