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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

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
Fiction
Morning
Longhand
Write
Pads
Writing
Nixon
Like
Legal
Yellow
Table
Tables

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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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To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word democracy.
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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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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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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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...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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Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.
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People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.
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Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
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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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Realism has always been called cynicism.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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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.
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The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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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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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.
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