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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

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
American
President
Retainer
Retainers
Manhattan
Chase
Loyal
Bank

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Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.
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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.
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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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I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
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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 Congress no longer represents the people.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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The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
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Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
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I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
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I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
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You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
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We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
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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.
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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
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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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