We’re not a democracy.
GORE VIDALI’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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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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I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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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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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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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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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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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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That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
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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 only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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I can understand companionship.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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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.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
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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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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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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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