Quote

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.

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
Poor
Insisted
Spirit
Caution
Better
Identical
Thing
Morality
Made
Essence
World
Choose
Position
Knew
Perilous

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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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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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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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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Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
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You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
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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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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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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.
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People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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