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

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
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 Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
Gore Vidal
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
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Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
Gore Vidal
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As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
Gore Vidal
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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.
Gore Vidal
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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
Gore Vidal
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Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
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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Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Gore Vidal
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I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system tones you up.
Gore Vidal
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Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
Gore Vidal
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
Gore Vidal
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
Gore Vidal
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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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