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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

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
Journalist
Unless
Writer
Tell
Truth
Must
Always

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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
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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.
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Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
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I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
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Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
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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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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
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Many people in the United States happen to believe that United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of western Europe and the other parts of the world.
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I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.
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A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
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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.
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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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Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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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.
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To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
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The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
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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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