Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
GORE VIDALI’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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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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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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
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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.
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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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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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I am only at home in the present.
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Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
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