Having 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.
GORE VIDALJack 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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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.
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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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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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I can understand companionship.
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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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Corporations must pay tax.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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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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Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.
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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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TV news is not very instructive.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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