A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
GORE VIDALIt is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
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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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
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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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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
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It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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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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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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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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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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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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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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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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By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
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I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
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