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We Are In Love With The Word. We Are Proud Of It. The Word Precedes The Formation Of The State. The Word Comes To Us From Every Avatar Of Early Human Existence. As Writers, We Are Obliged More Than Others To Keep Our Lives Attached To The Primitive Power Of The Word. From India, Out Of The Vedas, We Still Hear: On The Spoken Word, All The Gods Depend, All Beasts And Men; In The World Live All Creatures...the Word Is The Name Of The Divine World.

-Norman Mailer

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We Are In Love

Norman Mailer

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We Are In Love With The Word. We Are Proud Of It. The Word Precedes The Formation Of The State. The Word Comes To Us From Every Avatar Of Early Human Existence. As Writers, We Are Obliged More Than Others To Keep Our Lives Attached To The Primitive Power Of The Word. From India, Out Of The Vedas, We Still Hear: On The Spoken Word, All The Gods Depend, All Beasts And Men; In The World Live All Creatures...the Word Is The Name Of The Divine World.

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A Modern Democracy Is A Tyranny Whose Borders Are Undefined; One Discovers How Far One Can Go Only By Traveling In A Straight Line Until One Is Stopped.

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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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I No Longer Gave A Sick Dog's Drop For The Wisdom, The Reliability And The Authority Of The Public's Literary Mind, Those Creeps And Old Ladies Of Vested Reviewing.

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

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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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Reagan Bankrupted The Soviet Union By Increasing Armaments.

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

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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.

I'm Hostile To Men, I'm Hostile To Women, I'm Hostile To Cats, To Poor Cockroaches, I'm Afraid Of Horses.

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With The Pride Of The Artist, You Must Blow Against The Walls Of Every Power That Exists The Small Trumpet Of Your Defiance.

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Did A Sense Of Shame Ever Reside In Our Republican Toadies? You Can't Stop People Who Are Never Embarrassed By Themselves. Will's Readiness To Turn A Sow's Ear Into A Silk Purse Can Be Cited As World Class Sycophancy.

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Falling In Love

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I Hate Everything Which Is Not In Myself.

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

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The Contradictory Remarks Of Politicians Are Forgotten; The More Asinine Predictions Of Pundits Are Buried With Mercy.

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

The Irish Are The Only Men Who Know How To Cry For The Dirty Polluted Blood Of All The World.

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Faction Is That Hybrid Of Documented Fact And Novelistic Elaboration.

God Is A Creator, Not A Law Giver.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If God Is All Good, Then He Is Not All Powerful. If God Is All Powerful, Then He Is Not All Good. I Am A Disbeliever Is The Omnipotence Of God Because Of The Holocaust. But For 35 Years, I Have Been Believing That He Is Doing The Best He Can.

There Was That Law Of Life, So Cruel And So Just, That One Must Grow Or Else Pay More For Remaining The Same.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

The Greater The Power Of Any Subjective State, The More Total Is A Romantic's Assumption That Everyone Understands Exactly What He Is About To Do, Therefore Waste Not A Moment By Stopping To Tell Them.

A Political Convention Is After All Not A Meeting Of A Corporation's Board Of Directors; It Is A Fiesta, A Carnival, A Pig-rooting, Horse-snorting, Band-playing, Voice-screaming Medieval Get-together Of Greed, Practical Lust, Compromised Idealism, Career-advancement, Meeting, Feud, Vendetta, Conciliation, Of Rabble-rousers, Fist Fights (as It Used To Be), Embraces, Drunks (again As It Used To Be) And Collective Rivers Of Animal Sweat.

As Kierkegaard Was The First To Suggest, We Can Never Know Where Our Prayers Are Likely To Go Nor From Whom The Answers Will Come. When We Think We Are Nearest To God, We Could Be Assisting The Devil.

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

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

Like All Men Who Are Napoleonic In Their Ambitionshe Has Instincts About The Nature Of Growth, A Lover's Sense Of The Momentof Crisis, And He Knewhow Costly Is Defeat When It Is Not Soothed By Greater Consciousness, And How Wasteful Is The Profit Of Victory When There Is Not The Courage To Employ It.

So You Come Soon To Power, But You Have Merely Inherited The Crisis And Yours Is The Profit Of Cancer.

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

...never Have I Subscribed To The Doctrine Of Willful Rejection Of The World Or Its Visual Image. To The Non-objectivist This Act Of Impiety May Be Shockingly Impure, But God, I Have No Desire To Be Either Hollow Or Sterile.

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Somerset Maugham ... Wrote Somewhere That "nobody Is Any Better Than He Ought To Be."... I Carried It Along With Me As A Working Philosophy, But I Suppose That Finally I Would Have To Take Exception To The Thought ... Or Else The Universe Is Just An Elaborate Clock.

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America Has An Almost Obscene Infatuation With Itself. Has There Ever Been A Big, Powerful Country That Is As Patriotic As America? And Patriotic In The Tinniest Way, With So Much Flag Waving? You'd Really Think We Were Some Poor Little Republic, And That If One Person Lost His Religion For One Hour, The Whole Thing Would Crumble. America Is The Real Religion In This Country.

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

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

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

A Nation Fights Well In Proportion To The Amount Of Men And Materials It Has. And The Other Equation Is That The Individual Soldier In That Army Is A More Effective Soldier The Poorer His Standard Of Living Has Been In The Past.

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Courage To Love

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.

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.

We Are In Love With The Word. We Are Proud Of It. The Word Precedes The Formation Of The State. The Word Comes To Us From Every Avatar Of Early Human Existence. As Writers, We Are Obliged More Than Others To Keep Our Lives Attached To The Primitive Power Of The Word. From India, Out Of The Vedas, We Still Hear: On The Spoken Word, All The Gods Depend, All Beasts And Men; In The World Live All Creatures...the Word Is The Name Of The Divine World.

I Did Like Robert Vavra's Book Not Only For Its So Very Good Photographs But For The Text As Well. He's No Ordinary Fellow, Obviously.

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

Somewhere, Something Incredible Happened In History - The Wrong Guys Won.

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.

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

Prevarication, Like Honesty, Is Reflexive, And Soon Becomes A Sturdy Habit, As Reliable As Truth.

Love Asks Us That We Be A Little Braver Than Is Comfortable, A Little More Generous, A Little More Flexible. It Means Living On The Edge More Than We Care To.

Everything Wrong With America Led To The Point Where The Country Built That Tower Of Babel, Which Consequently Had To Be Destroyed. And Then Came The Next Shock. We Had To Realize That The People That Did This Were Brilliant. It Showed That The Ego We Could Hold Up Until September 10 Was Inadequate.

I Take It For Granted That There's A Side Of Me That Loves Public Action, And There's Another Side Of Me That Really Wants To Be Alone And Work And Write. And I've Learned To Alternate The Two As Matters Develop.

I Would Introduce Myself If It Were Not Useless. The Name I Had Last Night Will Not Be The Same As The Name I Have Tonight. For The Moment, Then, Let Me Say That I Am Thinking Of Sam Slovoda.

Any War That Requires The Suspension Of Reason As A Necessity For Support Is A Bad War.

In Such Places As Greenwich Village, A Menage-a-trois Was Completed- The Bohemian And The Juvenile Delinquent Came Face-to-face With The Negro, And The Hipster Was A Fact In American Life.

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.

The Ultimate Tendency Of Liberalism Is Vegetarianism.

Dying Can't Be All That Difficult-up To Now Everyone Has Managed To Do It.

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

It's Not A Good Idea To Put Your Wife Into A Novel; Not Your Latest Wife Anyway.

On A Late-winter Evening In 1983, While Driving Through Fog Along The Maine Coast, Recollections Of Old Campfires Began To Drift Into The March Mist, And I Thought Of The Abnaki Indians Of The Algonquin Tribe Who Dwelt Near Bangor A Thousand Years Ago.

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.

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Karl A. Menninger

Oliver Cromwell

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