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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.

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
Half
Truth
Government
Mention
Anything
Rulers
Done
Told
Made
Century
Never
Politics
People
Sure

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There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
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Always a godfather, never a god.
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Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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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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I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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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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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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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
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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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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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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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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
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To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.
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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.
Gore Vidal