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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.

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

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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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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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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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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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 had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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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.
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There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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