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I Have Always Had This Very Strong, Call It A Feeling, Call It A Prejudice, Call It A Conviction ... That The Mysteries Are Not Easily Available. You Have To Earn Entrance Into Them. You Didn't Learn Things For Too Little. You Had To Pay A Price. And I Felt That Lsd Was Just Blasting Superhighways Into The Mysteries. And What I Really Didn't Like About Lsd Is That People Who Were Taking It Were Seeming To Become Less And Less As They Took It. They Got Emptier And More Vapid.

-Norman Mailer

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I Have Always Had

Norman Mailer

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I Have Always Had This Very Strong, Call It A Feeling, Call It A Prejudice, Call It A Conviction ... That The Mysteries Are Not Easily Available. You Have To Earn Entrance Into Them. You Didn't Learn Things For Too Little. You Had To Pay A Price. And I Felt That Lsd Was Just Blasting Superhighways Into The Mysteries. And What I Really Didn't Like About Lsd Is That People Who Were Taking It Were Seeming To Become Less And Less As They Took It. They Got Emptier And More Vapid.

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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.

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.

People Move Forward Into The Future Out Of The Way They Comprehend The Past. When We Don't Understand Something In Our Past, We Are Therefore Crippled.

The Natural Role Of Twentieth-century Man Is Anxiety.

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.

Great Sex Is Apocalyptic. There Is No Such Thing As Great Sex Unless You Have An Apocalyptic Moment.

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.

I Do Believe That America's Deepest Political Sickness Is That It Is A Self-righteous Nation.

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.

The Sense Of A Long Last Night Over Civilization Is Back Again.

There Are Days When I'll Wake Up And Think, Oh, I've Really Been Something. You Know, It Won't Be The Same Without Me. And Then There Are Days When I Wake Up And I Say, 'don't Kid Yourself. Your Contribution Was Minimal. You Changed Very Little. Everything You Hated Prospered'.

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.

Growth, In Some Curious Way, I Suspect, Depends On Being Always In Motion Just A Little Bit, One Way Or Another.

To Be Married To A Good Woman Is To Live With Tender Surprise.

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.

Every Time A Story About Me Appears In A Newspaper, I Am Injured Professionally.

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William Falconer

John Mason Brown

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