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What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.

Gore Vidal

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
GORE VIDAL

Character Creation Impression Myself Settle Writing
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.
GORE VIDAL

Black Communist Hate Result World
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
GORE VIDAL

Chaos Moments Opinion Prejudice Public
It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
GORE VIDAL

Best Divorce Finding Ourselves People Stay
We’re not a democracy.
GORE VIDAL

Democracy One Liner
By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
GORE VIDAL

Damage End Greatness Nation Powerful War
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.
GORE VIDAL

Colony Mass Rebel War
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
GORE VIDAL

Happiness Liberty Life Right
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
GORE VIDAL

Adult Consent Myself
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.
GORE VIDAL

Enjoyment Life Military Reality Story
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
GORE VIDAL

Children Expectation Forever
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
GORE VIDAL

Death Forever Human Race
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.
GORE VIDAL

Agreement Father Fellow Himself Raise Secret
The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.
GORE VIDAL

Money Talk Tax Time
When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
GORE VIDAL

Myself President Thinking
After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
GORE VIDAL

Diminish Interesting Life Oneself Story
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
GORE VIDAL

Civil Finding Liberty Live Police
Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Remember Writing
I am only at home in the present.
GORE VIDAL

Home Oneself Present
You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
GORE VIDAL

Greatness Reading Writing Yourself
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Novel Reading Writing
Love is not my bag.
GORE VIDAL

Love One Liner
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.
GORE VIDAL

Attack Death Earth Ourselves Thinking
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
GORE VIDAL

Himself Interesting Money
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
GORE VIDAL

Himself Man Material President Time
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 VIDAL

Invention President Suspend War
Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
GORE VIDAL

Wikipedia Wrong

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.

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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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