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By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success
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
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Perfectly
Italians
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Demonstrating
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More quotes by Gore Vidal
You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
Gore Vidal
Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
Gore Vidal
When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.
Gore Vidal
Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
Gore Vidal
Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Gore Vidal
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
Gore Vidal
The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
Gore Vidal
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Gore Vidal
I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.
Gore Vidal
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
Gore Vidal
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.
Gore Vidal
To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
Gore Vidal
When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
Gore Vidal
The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
Gore Vidal