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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
Norman Mailer
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The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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.
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Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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In the air the Pentagon would then, went the presumption, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.
Norman Mailer
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I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."
Norman Mailer
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The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, 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
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Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."… I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
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In Miami Beach the air conditioning is pushed to that icy point where women may wear fur coats over their diamonds in the tropics.
Norman Mailer
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When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
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Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.
Norman Mailer
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We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
Norman Mailer
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I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.
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His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.
Norman Mailer
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
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So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purpose could be considered a white Negro.
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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.
Norman Mailer
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
Norman Mailer
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So we think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.
Norman Mailer
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
Norman Mailer
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In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.
Norman Mailer
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The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.
Norman Mailer
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Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Norman Mailer
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Norman Mailer
Creative Commons
Born:
January 31, 1923
Died:
November 10, 2007
(aged 84)
Bio:
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948.
Known for:
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
The Executioner's Song (1979)
The Armies of the Night (1968)
Harlot's Ghost (1991)
The Fight (1975)
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