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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).

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
Superiority
Subject
Subjects
Write
Used
Writing
Icy
Never
Memoir
Begun

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Realism has always been called cynicism.
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A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.
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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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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 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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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.
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There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
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The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
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I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
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The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
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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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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
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