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Three Miles Long And Two Streets Wide, The Town Curls Around The Bay ... A Gaudy Run With Mediterranean Splashes Of Color, Crowded Steep-pitched Roofs, Fishing Piers And Fishing Boats Whose Stench Of Mackerel And Gasoline Is As Aphrodisiac To The Sensuous Nose As The Clean Bar-whisky Smell Of A Nightclub Where Call Girls Congregate.

-Norman Mailer

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Three Miles Long And

Norman Mailer

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Three Miles Long And Two Streets Wide, The Town Curls Around The Bay ... A Gaudy Run With Mediterranean Splashes Of Color, Crowded Steep-pitched Roofs, Fishing Piers And Fishing Boats Whose Stench Of Mackerel And Gasoline Is As Aphrodisiac To The Sensuous Nose As The Clean Bar-whisky Smell Of A Nightclub Where Call Girls Congregate.

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Culture's Worth Huge, Huge Risks. Without Culture We're All Totalitarian Beasts.

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There`s A Tendency For Americans, Particularly The Simpler You Are, The More You Believe In The President As The Kind Of Person To Be.

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.

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

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

You Can Indulge Your Righteous Rage But The Things It Comes Out Of Are Pretty Cheap. The Trick Is To Make Yourself An Instrument Of Your Own Policy. Whether You Like It Or Not, That's The Highest Effectiveness Man Has Achieved.

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

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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.

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So The Blind Will Lead The Blind, And The Deaf Shout Warnings To One Another Until Their Voices Are Lost.

The Sense Of A Long Last Night Over Civilization Is Back Again; It Has Perhaps Not Been Here So Intensely In Thirty Years, Not Since The Nazis Were Prospering, But It Is Coming Back.

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

Khomeini Has Offered Us The Opportunity To Regain Our Frail Religion ... Faith In The Power Of Words.

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To Make An Army Work You Have To Have Every Man In It Fitted Into A Fear Ladder... The Army Functions Best When You're Frightened Of The Man Above You, And Contemptuous Of Your Subordinates.

Mailer's Law: A Thing Either Gets Better Or It Costs More To Run It The Way It Was.

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

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

The Writer Can Grow As A Person Or He Can Shrink. ... His Curiosity, His Reaction To Life Must Not Diminish. The Fatal Thing Is To Shrink, To Be Interested In Less, Sympathetic To Less, Desiccating To The Point Where Life Itself Loses Its Flavor, And One’s Passion For Human Understanding Changes To Weariness And Distaste.

I Had A Quick Grasp Of The Secret To Sanity, It Had Become The Ability To Hold The Maximum Of Impossible Combinations In One's Mind.

Only Another Writer Can Know How Much Damage Writing A Novel Can Do To You. It's An Unnatural Activity To Sit At A Desk And Squeeze Words Out Of Yourself.

When You Know Too Much Information And You Acquire It Too Easily, You Tend To Either Use It In Disagreeable Ways, Out Of Vanity, Or You Tend To Be Indiscriminate About It. I Mean, In The Old Days, It Was Tricky, You Had To Go To Various Encyclopedias, You Had To Go To The Library, Maybe Spend A Day There, Whatever. But In The End, If You Found Something, It Was Really Exciting. Now You Hit A Couple Of Buttons And You Get Some Information. Which, By The Way, Is Almost Always Presented In That Same Goddamn Mediocre Style That Characterizes The Internet For Me. It Is Slightly Deadening.

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God Like Us Suffers The Ambition To Make A Destiny More Extraordinary Than Was Conceived For Him, Yes God Is Like Me, Only More So.

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America Is A Hurricane, And The Only People Who Do Not Hear The Sound Are Those Fortunate If Incredibly Stupid And Smug White Protestants Who Live In The Center, In The Serene Eye Of The Big Wind.

I Don't Trust Compliments. I've Been Getting Them For Years. Sometimes I Deserve Them, Sometimes I Didn't. But Generally When People Give You Compliments There's One Of Two Things Wrong With Them. Either They're False, Or What's Worse Is They're Sincere. They Really Mean The Compliment. And Then They're Offering You Their Loyalty. And I'm Kind Of A Stingy... Well, I Don't Necessarily Want To Give All That Loyalty Back. So Either Way, Let's Skip The Compliments.

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I've Made An Ass Of Myself So Many Times I Often Wonder If I Am One.

Faction Is That Hybrid Of Documented Fact And Novelistic Elaboration.

The Only Journey Of Knowledge Is From The Depth Of One Being To The Heart Of Another.

I Am Convinced The Most Unfortunate People Are Those Who Would Make An Art Of Love. It Sours Other Effort. Of All Artists, They Are Certainly The Most Wretched.

In America All Too Few Blows Are Struck Into Flesh. We Kill The Spirit Here, We Are Experts At That. We Use Psychic Bullets And Kill Each Other Cell By Cell.

The Frenchman Jean-paulsartre ... Had A Dialectical Mind Good As A Machine For Cybernetics, Immense In Its Way, He Could Peel A Nuance Like An Onion, But He Had No Sense Of Evil, The Anguish Of God, And The Possible Existence Of Satan.

I Hate Everything Which Is Not In Myself.

You Have The Right To Speak Your Mind.

Speak Your Mind

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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.

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I Really Am A Pessimist. I've Always Felt That Fascism Is A More Natural Governmental Condition Than Democracy. Democracy Is A Grace. It's Something Essentially Splendid Because It's Not At All Routine Or Automatic. Fascism Goes Back To Our Infancy And Childhood, Where We Were Always Told How To Live. We Were Told, Yes, You May Do This; No, You May Not Do That. So The Secret Of Fascism Is That It Has This Appeal To People Whose Later Lives Are Not Satisfactory.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

Chicago Was A Town Where Nobody Could Forget How The Money Was Made. It Was Picked Up From Floors Still Slippery With Blood.

Being A Real Writer Means Being Able To Do The Work On A Bad Day.

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.

While I'm Working On A Book, I Rarely Read Anything More Than The New York Times. Which May Have The Long-term Effect Of Flattening My Style.

At Bottom, I Mean Profoundly At Bottom, The Fbi Has Nothing To Do With Communism, It Has Nothing To Do With Catching Criminals, It Has Nothing To Do With The Mafia, The Syndicate, It Has Nothing To Do With Trust-busting, It Has Nothing To Do With Interstate Commerce, It Has Nothing To Do With Anything But Serving As A Church For The Mediocre. A High Church For The True Mediocre.

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

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Love Is Simple To Understand If You Haven't Got A Mind Soft And Full Of Holes. It's A Crutch, That's All, And There Isn't Any One Of Us That Doesn't Need A Crutch.

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Love Was Love, One Could Find It With Anyone, One Could Find It Anywhere. It Was Just That You Could Never Keep It. Not Unless You Were Ready To Die For It.

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.

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Harsh Words Live In The Dungeon Of The Heart

I Can`t Get Excited About Politics, But I Love It As A Game. Because What I Love In Politics - This Is Very Selfish Of Me, But Who Cares - What I Do Love In Politics Is This Ability It Has To Make You Think In New Ways.

Great Hope Has No Real Footing Unless One Is Willing To Face Into The Doom That May Also Be On The Way. P.207

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

We Are All So Guilty At The Way We Have Allowed The World Around Us To Become More Ugly And Tasteless Every Year That We Surrender To Terror And Steep Ourselves In It.

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.

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

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

The Function Of Socialism Is To Raise Suffering To A Higher Level.

Writers Don't Have Lifestyles. They Just Sit In Little Rooms And Write.

What Were The Phenomena Of The World Today? If I Knew Little Else, I Knew The Answer - War, And The Preparations For New War.

Decade After Decade, Artists Came To Paint The Light Of Provincetown, And Comparisons Were Made To The Lagoons Of Venice And The Marshes Of Holland, But Then The Summer Ended And Most Of The Painters Left, And The Long Dingy Undergarment Of The Gray New England Winter, Gray As The Spirit Of My Mood, Came Down To Visit.

The Sickness Of Our Times For Me Has Been Just This Damn Thing That Everything Has Been Getting Smaller And Smaller And Less And Less Important, That The Romantic Spirit Has Dried Up, That There Is No Shame Today. We're All Getting So Mean And Small And Petty And Ridiculous, And We All Live Under The Threat Of Extermination.

The Ultimate Tendency Of Liberalism Is Vegetarianism.

Existentialism Is The Kind Of Philosophy That Makes For Legendary Children.

The Mark Of Mediocrity Is To Look For Precedent.

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

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

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

Armstrong, Sitting In The Commander's Seat, Spacesuit On, Helmet On, Plugged Into Electrical And Environmental Umbilical's, Is A Man Who Is Not Only A Machine Himself In The Links Of These Networks, But Is Also A Man Sitting In (what Collins Is Later To Call) A 'mini-cathedral.' A Man Somewhat More Than A Pilot, Somewhat More Than A Superpilot, Is In Fact A Veritable High Priest Of The Forces Of Society And Scientific History Concentrated In That Mini Cathedral, A General Of The Church Of The Forces Of Technology.

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.

I Don't Read Other Writers Because I'm Writing All The Time. It's Too Disturbing To Read A Writer With A Good Style When You're In The Middle Of Putting Your Work Together.

Working Together

What Is There About Polarity That Is Matter Becoming More Complex?

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.

We Love Those Who Can Lead Us To A Place We Will Never Reach Without Them.

Cute Friendship

It's Not The Sentiments Of Men Which Make History But Their Actions.

There's Nothing Glorious About Being A Professional. . . . Professionalism Probably Comes Down To Being Able To Work On A Bad Day.

You're Gambling With Something Vital. Most Writers Get Smashed Egos.

I'm A Great Believer In The Hereafter, In Karma, In Reincarnation. It Does Make Sense. I Believe That God Is Not Just A Law-giver, But A Creative Artist. The Greatest Of All. And What Characterises Artists Is That They Want To Redo Their Work. Maybe It Didn't Come Off Perfectly, So They Want To See It Done Again, And Improved. Reincarnation Is A Way For God To Improve His Earlier Works.

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