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I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.
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
Seldom
Opposite
Opposites
Violent
Revolution
Bring
Real
Always
Revolutions
More quotes by Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Gore Vidal
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
Gore Vidal
One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
Gore Vidal
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
Gore Vidal
We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.
Gore Vidal
We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
Gore Vidal
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
Gore Vidal
I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
Gore Vidal
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
Gore Vidal
Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
Gore Vidal
The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
Gore Vidal
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.
Gore Vidal
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
Gore Vidal
What is a political party but a conspiracy?
Gore Vidal
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
Gore Vidal
