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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.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
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Film Director
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Journalist
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Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Sense
Anguish
Frenchman
Mind
Immense
Cybernetics
Way
Satan
Frenchmen
Good
Machine
Peel
Like
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Onion
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Jean
Possible
Onions
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Dialectical

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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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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I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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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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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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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.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
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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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So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
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