It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
GORE VIDALBetween fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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TV news is not very instructive.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
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Corporations must pay tax.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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I am only at home in the present.
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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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.
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The media can’t get anything straight.
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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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