In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
GORE VIDALIt is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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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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I hate nobody.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
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I can understand companionship.
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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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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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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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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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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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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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In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
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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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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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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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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.
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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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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL