After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
GORE VIDALThe four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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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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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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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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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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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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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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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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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
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The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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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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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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Gossip is conversation about people.
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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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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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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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I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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I can understand companionship.
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If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
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