The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
GORE VIDALSome 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
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I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
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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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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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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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To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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We’re not a democracy.
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You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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It 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.
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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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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.
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Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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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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The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
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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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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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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
GORE VIDAL