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I Really Gave Up Being Passionate About Politics 10, 15, 20 Years Ago, Because I Think Finally That There Were Forces In The Country That Are Larger Than Politics Itself. And So I Find It A Fascinating Game, This Wonderful Stuff Goes On In Terms Of Watching The Game. But If You Get To Down It, Look, I`m Going To Root For Someone, I`ll Root At A Football Game, Not For Politicians.

-Norman Mailer

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I Really Gave Up

Norman Mailer

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I Really Gave Up Being Passionate About Politics 10, 15, 20 Years Ago, Because I Think Finally That There Were Forces In The Country That Are Larger Than Politics Itself. And So I Find It A Fascinating Game, This Wonderful Stuff Goes On In Terms Of Watching The Game. But If You Get To Down It, Look, I`m Going To Root For Someone, I`ll Root At A Football Game, Not For Politicians.

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When The Wind Carries A Cry Which Is Meaningful To Human Ears, It Is Simpler To Believe The Wind Shares With Us Some Part Of The Emotion Of Being Than That The Mysteries Of A Hurricane's Rising Murmur Reduce To No More Than The Random Collision Of Insensate Molecules.

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For 40 Years We Were Led To Think Of The Russians As Godless, Materialistic And An Evil Empire. When The Cold War Ended, We Suddenly Discovered That Russia Was A Poor Third World Country. They Had Not Been Equipped To Take Over The World. In Fact, They Were Just Trying To Improve A Miserable Standard Of Oppressive Living, And Couldn't. They Had To Spend Too Much On Arms Build-up. We Didn't Win The Cold War; We Bankrupted The Russians. In Effect, It Was A Big Bank Exhausting The Reserves Of A Smaller One.

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The Desire For Success Lubricates Secret Prostitution In The Soul.

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Over-certified Adjectives Are The Mark Of Most Best-seller Writing

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There Is A No Man's Land Between Sex And Love, And It Alters In The Night.

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If You Can Change Style, Why Stick To One Style? Style Is A Vanity Because It Gives You Product Identification.

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Crude Thoughts And Fierce Forces Are My State. I Do Not Know Who I Am. Nor What I Was. I Cannot Hear A Sound. Pain Is Near That Will Be Like No Pain Felt Before.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

In Every Death Is A Celebration; In Every Ecstasy, One Little Death.

The Barry Goldwater Movement Excited The Depths Because The Apocalypse Was Brought More Near, And Like Millions Of Other Whites, I Had Been Leading A Life Which Was A Trifle Too Pointless And A Trifle Too Full Of Guilt And My Gullet Was Close To Nausea With The Empty Promises Of An Empty Liberal Center.

Tough Guys Don't Dance. You Had Better Believe It.

The Fact That We've Been A Great Democracy Doesn't Mean We Will Automatically Keep Being One If We Keep Waving The Flag.

No Heart Is So Hard As The Timid Heart.

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Murder Offers The Promise Of Vast Relief. It Is Never Unsexual.

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We Have An Absolute Right In A Democracy To Argue About A War.

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People Who Live Under Fascism Are Not Only Miserable But They're Full Of Shame. You Just Don't Go In And Inject Democracy Into Them. They're Half Crazy With Their Own.

The Paradox Is That No Love Can Prove So Intense As The Love Of Two Narcissists For Each Other.

Short-term Amnesia Is Not The Worst Affliction If You Have An Irish Flair For The Sauce.

The World's Not What I Want It To Be. But Then No One Ever Said I Had The Right To Design The World.

People Who Are Greedy Have Extraordinary Capacities For Waste-they Must, They Take In Too Much.

We Didn't Win The Cold War, We Were Just A Big Bank That Bankrupted A Smaller Bank Because We Had An Arms Race That Wiped The Russians Out.

Madness Is Locked Beneath. It Goes Into Tissues, Is Swallowed By The Cells. The Cells Go Mad. Cancer Is Their Flag. Cancer Is Thegrowth Of Madness Denied.

...the Indispensable Requirement For A Good Newspaperman - As Eager To Tell A Lie As The Truth.

I Respect Most Boxers Because They're Violent People Who Learned To Discipline Themselves ... A Good Boxer Is An Artist ... Boxing Is Existential - Some Fights Are Better Than Others.

Writing Can Wreck Your Body. You Sit There On The Chair Hour After Hour And Sweat Your Guts Out To Get A Few Words.

Goldstein, You'd Be A Pretty Good Boy If You Wasn't So Chicken.

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.

If A Person Is Not Talented Enough To Be A Novelist, Not Smart Enough To Be A Lawyer, And His Hands Are Too Shaky To Perform Operations, He Becomes A Journalist.

Chicago Is The Great American City, New York Is One Of The Capitals Of The World, And Los Angeles Is A Constellation Of Plastic; San Francisco Is A Lady

I Always Start A Book For Money. If You're Married Five Times You Have To.

You Don't Know A Woman Until You've Met Her In Court.

The Century Would Seek To Dominate Nature As It Had Never Been Dominated, Would Attack The Idea Of War, Poverty And Natural Catastrophe As Never Before. The Century Would Create Death, Devastation And Pollution As Never Before. Yet The Century Was Now Attached To The Idea That Man Must Take His Conception Of Life Out To The Stars.

I Am Not Here Only So That The Blind Might See, But To Teach Those Who Thought They Could See That They Are Blind

Even An Evil Man Can Have Principleshe Can Be True To His Own Evil, Which Is Not Always So Easy.

Mike Lee Writes With Honesty, Penetration, Wit And The Ability To Surprise The Reader With An Unexpected Turn From Time To Time That Enriches The Experience.

The Art Of The Novel Is To Arrive At That Artless Point Where Your Characters Become More Real Than Yourself.

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.

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?

When I Read It ["tough Guys Don't Dance"], I Don't Wince, Which Is All I Ever Ask For A Book I Write.

The Horror Of The Twentieth Century Was The Size Of Each New Event, And The Paucity Of Its Reverberation.

There Are These Two Kinds Of Patriotism. There's Blind Patriotism, Unflagging Patriotism. And Then There's The Patriotism That Says I Live In A Democracy And It's Very Important For The Health And The Life Of This Democracy That It Get Better All The Time, Not Get Worse.

Left-wingers Are Incapable Of Conspiring Because They Are All Egomaniacs.

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