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.
GORE VIDALYou cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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I 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.
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TV news is not very instructive.
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
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We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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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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Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
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What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
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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.
GORE VIDAL