Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
GORE VIDALI remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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I can understand companionship.
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Gossip is conversation about people.
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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 more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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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.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
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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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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.
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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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Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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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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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
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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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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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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.
GORE VIDAL