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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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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
Cynical
Realistic
Seem
Goes
Others
Seems
Problem

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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
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Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
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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.
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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.
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Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
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The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
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Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
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I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
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There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.
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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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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.
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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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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
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Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
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You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
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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.
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