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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

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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
Five
Another
Nothing
Draft
Great
Obsessive
Way
Add
Usually
Deal
Deals

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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
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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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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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Terrorism is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
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Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.
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These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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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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Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.
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Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.
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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
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Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
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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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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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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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