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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
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Katherine Everard
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Thousand
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Balzac
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Essays

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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
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I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
Gore Vidal
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I'm in favor of sexual encounters.
Gore Vidal
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Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.
Gore Vidal
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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
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I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
Gore Vidal
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A good deed never goes unpunished.
Gore Vidal
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Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
Gore Vidal
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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
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
Gore Vidal
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Politics is made up of two words: Poli, which is Greek for many, and tics, which are bloodsucking insects.
Gore Vidal
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True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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The unfed mind devours itself.
Gore Vidal
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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
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There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
Gore Vidal
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Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal
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Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
Gore Vidal
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In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
Gore Vidal
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Gore Vidal