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 VIDALThe greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
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Love is not my bag.
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Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
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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.
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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.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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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.
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Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
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It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
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Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
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You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
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Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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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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In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.
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I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
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