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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal
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Gore Vidal
Age: 86 †
Born: 1925
Born: October 3
Died: 2012
Died: July 31
Actor
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
West Point
New York
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Gor Vidal
Cameron Kay
Eugene Luther Vidal
Edgar Box
Katherine Everard
Eugene Vidal
Enough
Envy
Must
Fail
Succeed
Failure
Failing
Politics
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Gore
Political
Cynicism
More quotes by Gore Vidal
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
Gore Vidal
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
Gore Vidal
We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.
Gore Vidal
Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
Gore Vidal
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
Gore Vidal
I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
Gore Vidal
I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
Gore Vidal
The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal
I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
Gore Vidal
I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.
Gore Vidal
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
Gore Vidal
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
Gore Vidal
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
Gore Vidal
Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
Gore Vidal
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
Gore Vidal
[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.
Gore Vidal
