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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
Ambitious
Americans
Hundred
Read
Stills
Still
Able
Years
Alphabet

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USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
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I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
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This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
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What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
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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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Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.
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A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
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The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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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.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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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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