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You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

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
Given
Best
Must
Kind
Make
Improve
Mysterious
Constant
Talent

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
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I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
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To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
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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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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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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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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
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All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
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If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
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Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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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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Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
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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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...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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When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'
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No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
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