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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
Come
Really
Good
Undisciplined
Men
Style
Comes
Cannot
Become
Character

More quotes by 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.
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Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
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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
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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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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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
Norman Mailer
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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
Norman Mailer
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
Norman Mailer
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
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No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer