I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
GORE VIDALStyle is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
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That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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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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We’re not a democracy.
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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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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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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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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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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Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
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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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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
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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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The unfed mind devours itself.
GORE VIDAL