Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
GORE VIDALSome writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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I am only at home in the present.
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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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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
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While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
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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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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
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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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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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I can understand companionship.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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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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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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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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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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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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I hate nobody.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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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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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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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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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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