Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
GORE VIDALHaving 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American 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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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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Americans have no idea of the extent of their government’s mischief… the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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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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Corporations must pay tax.
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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.
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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.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
GORE VIDAL