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The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.

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
United
Hawthorne
States
Suited
Live
Admirable
Many
Purposes
Wrote
Subject
Subjects
Purpose

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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
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I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.
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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.
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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
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I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
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What is a political party but a conspiracy?
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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
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Since nothing is free, to each his price.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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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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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.
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