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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Gore Vidal

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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Beautiful Language Ourselves Word
After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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Diminish Interesting Life Oneself Story
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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Enjoyment Life Military Reality Story
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
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Camp Concentration Discrimination German Oppression
Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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Myself Remember Writing
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
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Company Corporation Country Interest People Yourself
I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
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Criticism Literature Myself Name University
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
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Build Meaning Novel Sex
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.
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Money Talk Tax Time
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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Finding Greatness Pleasure Possible
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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Election Illumination Language Liberal Society Vote
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
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Children Myself Remember Silence
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
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Assumption Enemy Ourselves Space Target
I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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Heart Personality Play
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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Audience Drink Writing
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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Culture Joke Production See
On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
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Congress Form Man Weight
I hate nobody.
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Hate Myself One Liner
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.
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Invention President Suspend War
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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Myself Novel Reading Writing
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Candidate Democracy Issues Place
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
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Definition Preparation President
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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Missing Myself World
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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Artist Discover Emotion Important Known World
Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
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Difference Himself Religion
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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Character Creation Impression Myself Settle Writing
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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Poem Police

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

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