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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.

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
Spirit
Superior
True
Superiors
Matter
Birthday
Believe
Exercise
Literature
Age
Imaginative
Fact
Suspect
Facts
Suspects

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.
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People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.
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I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans in the New World, of course, they could and did.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.
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Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
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The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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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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We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
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If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.
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The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Gore Vidal
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.
Gore Vidal