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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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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
Virtue
Literature
Hygiene
Cannot
Stillness
Without
Active
Many
Writers
Made
Choose
Time
Lose
World
Loses

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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
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I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
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I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.
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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
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In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
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It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
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I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
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...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.
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Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
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It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
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In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.
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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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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
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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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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
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