To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
GORE VIDALI 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
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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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The media can’t get anything straight.
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As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.
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Corporations must pay tax.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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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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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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TV news is not very instructive.
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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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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.
GORE VIDAL