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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

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
Place
Firsts
First
Take
Verbally
Sometimes
Expressing
Writing
Pens
Think
Writers
Thinking
Paper

More quotes by 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.
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By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
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Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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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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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
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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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When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.
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The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.
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The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
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What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
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The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.
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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.
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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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Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
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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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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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Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
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