The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
GORE VIDALWhenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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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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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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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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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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The unfed mind devours itself.
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I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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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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Gossip is conversation about people.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
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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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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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