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Factoids... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotions in the Silent Majority.
Norman Mailer
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With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer
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You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.
Norman Mailer
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We are a Faustian age determined to meet the Lord or the Devil before we are done, and the ineluctable ore of the authentic is our only key to the lock.
Norman Mailer
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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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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.
Norman Mailer
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The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.
Norman Mailer
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There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Norman Mailer
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I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.
Norman Mailer
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
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For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful... That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive....
Norman Mailer
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We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?
Norman Mailer
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You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.
Norman Mailer
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He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!
Norman Mailer
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Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
Norman Mailer
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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
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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Norman Mailer
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Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it.
Norman Mailer
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The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
Norman Mailer
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I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
Norman Mailer
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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
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Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.
Norman Mailer
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He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.
Norman Mailer
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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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