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The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.

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
Since
Beauty
Overwhelmed
American
Arrogant
Point
Impressed
Social
Journalism
True
Therefore
Whole
Ought
Position

More quotes by 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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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
Gore Vidal
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
Gore Vidal
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You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
Gore Vidal
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The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
Gore Vidal
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Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
Gore Vidal
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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
Gore Vidal
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It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
Gore Vidal
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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
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Many people in the United States happen to believe that United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of western Europe and the other parts of the world.
Gore Vidal
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In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
Gore Vidal
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We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Gore Vidal
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I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
Gore Vidal
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Realism has always been called cynicism.
Gore Vidal
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Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
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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If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
Gore Vidal