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Norman Mailer Quotes

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"There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."

"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."

"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts."

"With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance."

"One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago."

"There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce."

"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."

"Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce."

"When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write."

"Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen."

"I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it."

"It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway."

"Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it."

"He got a corporation mind. He don't believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man."

"Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."

"In my day the library was a wonderful place... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge."

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

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