When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
GORE VIDALI cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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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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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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I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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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.
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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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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.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
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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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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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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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