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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

Gore Vidal

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
GORE VIDAL

Death Forever Human Race
Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
GORE VIDAL

Age Beginning Myself
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
GORE VIDAL

Essential Experience Literature Natural Work
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
GORE VIDAL

Believe Comedy Goodness Place Stone Theatre Writing
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.
GORE VIDAL

Feeling Life Man Yourself
Some 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.
GORE VIDAL

Agreement Father Fellow Himself Raise Secret
I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Optimistic President
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
GORE VIDAL

Government Need People Philosophy Religion
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.
GORE VIDAL

Change Reality Time Torture Victim
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
GORE VIDAL

Assumption Enemy Ourselves Space Target
I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
GORE VIDAL

Angry Myself Nature Thinking
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL

Death Friendship Myself Success
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.
GORE VIDAL

Behave Comparison Mindset Myself Team
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
GORE VIDAL

Day Study Truth Unknown
Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
GORE VIDAL

Hope Myself People Reading Vote
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.
GORE VIDAL

Money Talk Tax Time
TV news is not very instructive.
GORE VIDAL

Instruction One Liner
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.
GORE VIDAL

Credible Exception Ignorance Possible Society
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 VIDAL

Contemporary Realize Young Yourself
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
GORE VIDAL

Attack Death Earth Ourselves Thinking
The United States is a madhouse.
GORE VIDAL

Country Home Madness State
Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
GORE VIDAL

Difference Himself Religion
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
GORE VIDAL

Candidate Democracy Issues Place
It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
GORE VIDAL

Best Divorce Finding Ourselves People Stay
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
GORE VIDAL

Academics Fall Hands History
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
GORE VIDAL

Busy Oneself Sadness Writing
I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Sexuality Thinking

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

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