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.
GORE VIDALAt any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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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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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.
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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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History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
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What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
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By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
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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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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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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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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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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.
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