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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
Talent
Given
Best
Must
Kind
Make
Improve
Mysterious
Constant

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
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That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.
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I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
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The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
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This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
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In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
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Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
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It is not enough merely to win others must lose.
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Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.
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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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Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
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The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.
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Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
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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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