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America
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
-Gore Vidal
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Authors & Writing
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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
-Gore Vidal
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Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
-Gore Vidal
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
-Gore Vidal
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
-Gore Vidal
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Birds
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
-Gore Vidal
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Bureaucracy
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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
-Gore Vidal
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Charisma
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If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
-Gore Vidal
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Children
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Never have children, only grand children.
-Gore Vidal
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Criticism
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Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
(Gore Vidal writing about the critic Edmund Wilson)
-Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books, 1993
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Cynicism
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Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.
-Gore Vidal
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Democracy
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
-Gore Vidal
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
-Gore Vidal
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Envy / Jealousy
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
-Gore Vidal, "quoted in Sunday Times Magazine (London)", September 16, 1973
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Facts
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
-Gore Vidal
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Government
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
-Gore Vidal
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Language
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests
-Gore Vidal
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Media
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent.
-Gore Vidal
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Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions...
-Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
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Men
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There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.
-Gore Vidal
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Opportunity
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Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
-Gore Vidal
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Photography
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For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
-Gore Vidal
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Population
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
-Gore Vidal
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Power
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It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of
-Gore Vidal
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Praise
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
-Gore Vidal
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Presidency
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When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.
-Gore Vidal, Armageddon? (essay), 1987
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Publicity
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
-Gore Vidal
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Punishment
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I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
-Gore Vidal
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Sex
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Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
-Gore Vidal, In Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays 1952-1972 (1974).
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
-Gore Vidal
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There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo -- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
-Gore Vidal
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Space
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It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.
-Gore Vidal
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Speeches (oratory)
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All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven't done anything yet, and I think it's just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share.
-Gore Vidal
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
-Gore Vidal
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Style
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Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
-Gore Vidal
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Theater
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A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
-Gore Vidal
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The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
-Gore Vidal
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Twentieth Century
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
-Gore Vidal
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The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
-Gore Vidal
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Vanity
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
-Gore Vidal
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Voting
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It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
-Gore Vidal
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Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
-Gore Vidal
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Wealth
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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
-Gore Vidal
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Books by and about Gore Vidal
