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...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

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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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Never
Visuals
World
Visual
Impiety
Rejection
Subscribed
Doctrine
Shockingly
Image
Willful
Either
Impure
Desire
Sterile
May
Hollow

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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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.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
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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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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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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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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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The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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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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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.
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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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Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
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Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic San Francisco is a lady
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
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