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.’
GORE VIDALI cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.
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I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
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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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Corporations must pay tax.
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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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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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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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Gossip is conversation about people.
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World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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I’m always an optimist!
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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
GORE VIDAL