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The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

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
Sponges
Oysters
Learns
Writer
Nothing
Real
Life
Oyster
Like
Sponge

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
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If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
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Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
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I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
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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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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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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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I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir (I am not my own subject, I used to say with icy superiority).
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I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings one is Democrat and the other is Republican.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
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It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
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A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
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Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
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We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.
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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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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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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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