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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.

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
Something
Lifetime
Time
Army
Nagasaki
Like
Close
Foretaste
Came
Bombed
World
American
Hiroshima
Felt
Pacific
Ends
Serving
Self
Destruction

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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
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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.
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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).
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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 brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
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Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
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The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.
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I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
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I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
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