The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
GORE VIDALHaving 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.
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I hate nobody.
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As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
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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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Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
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I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
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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 can understand companionship.
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To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
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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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You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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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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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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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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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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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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Love is not my bag.
GORE VIDAL