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A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

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
Character
Come
Really
Good
Undisciplined
Men
Style
Comes
Cannot
Become

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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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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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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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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A high church for the true mediocre.
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Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
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Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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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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I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
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Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer