History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
GORE VIDALBetween fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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I can understand companionship.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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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.
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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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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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The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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