Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
GORE VIDALAs a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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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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I hate nobody.
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The media can’t get anything straight.
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You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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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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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
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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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In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.
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World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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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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Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
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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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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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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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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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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 truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
GORE VIDAL