The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
GORE VIDALThink of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
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My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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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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It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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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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We’re not a democracy.
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I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
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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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Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
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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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Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
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There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
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I’m always an optimist!
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