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It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

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
Read
Also
Practically
Ever
Assume
Nothing
Reasonable
Assuming
Later
Large
Literature

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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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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
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I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
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I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
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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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It is not enough merely to win others must lose.
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The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
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It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.
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These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
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There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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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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The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
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The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
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What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.
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I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
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What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
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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.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.
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