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All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
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
Hundred
Read
Stills
Still
Able
Years
Alphabet
Ambitious
Americans
More quotes by Gore Vidal
You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
Gore Vidal
I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.
Gore Vidal
I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
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
France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
Gore Vidal
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
Gore Vidal
Since nothing is free, to each his price.
Gore Vidal
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal
When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.
Gore Vidal
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
Gore Vidal
People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
Gore Vidal
People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal
There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
Gore Vidal
Always a godfather, never a god.
Gore Vidal
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
Gore Vidal
The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
Gore Vidal
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.
Gore Vidal
