It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
GORE VIDALWriting fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
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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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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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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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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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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
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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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History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
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Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
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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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Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
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I am only at home in the present.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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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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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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I can understand companionship.
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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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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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