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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.
Norman Mailer
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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
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Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
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More quotes by Norman Mailer
You have the right to speak your mind.
Norman Mailer
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
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
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
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.
Norman Mailer
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Norman Mailer
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Norman Mailer
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Norman Mailer
I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
Norman Mailer
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.
Norman Mailer
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Norman Mailer
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
Norman Mailer
I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
Norman Mailer
