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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.

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
Others
Direct
Years
Meaning
Montaigne
Reader
Balzac
Choose
Outlast
Writer
Essay
Novel
Essays
Thousand
Survive
Least
Communication

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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.
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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
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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.
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Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
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The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
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You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
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The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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