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

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My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general (They tell lies, he used to say with wonder, even when they don't have to).
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I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.
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It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
Gore Vidal
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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
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[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
Gore Vidal
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
Gore Vidal
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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
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
Gore Vidal