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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

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
Think
Class
Thinking
Write
Novels
People
Form
Highest
Seems
Marriage
Find
Seem
Important
Novel
Writing
Imagination
Thing
Middle

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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
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Having no talent is no longer enough.
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Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
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I think we're going to have to accept the fact the U.S. is off the world map. We are not a great player any longer. And when we come home - as we will have to do because we've run out of money - we will discover that Argentine debts means Argentine politics. And on that note, you can wake up in the middle of the night.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
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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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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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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 know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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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.
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The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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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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