Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDALThe truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
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Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
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It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
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The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
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If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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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.
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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
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I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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We’re not a democracy.
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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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.
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Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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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.
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Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
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As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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