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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
Believe
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Literature
Age
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Fact
Suspect
Facts
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Spirit
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True
Superiors
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More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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.
Gore Vidal
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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
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It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.
Gore Vidal
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
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Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.
Gore Vidal
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Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
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I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
Gore Vidal
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I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
Gore Vidal
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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
Gore Vidal
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Gore Vidal
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Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
Gore Vidal
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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
Gore Vidal
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
Gore Vidal
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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
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These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
Gore Vidal
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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
Gore Vidal
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The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
Gore Vidal
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They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?
Gore Vidal
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
Gore Vidal
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I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
Gore Vidal