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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
Poor
Insisted
Spirit
Caution
Better
Identical
Thing
Morality
Made
Essence
World
Choose
Position
Knew
Perilous
More quotes by Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.
Norman Mailer
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer
What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
Norman Mailer
We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
Norman Mailer
While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
Norman Mailer
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Norman Mailer
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
Norman Mailer
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
Norman Mailer
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer