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“I happened to pick up Moby Dick, and I haven’t thought about Melville ten times in the last thirty years. Picked up the first page of Moby Dick and read it, and I realized my style was formed by Melville. I’m not saying that I write as well as Melville, but my style was absolutely shaped by his love of long, rolling sentences that contain inversions and reverses and paradoxes and ironies and exclamation points and dashes.” NORMAN MAILER, from a 1990 interview published in Esquire