Quote

Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.

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
Actually
Stay
Missed
Social
Ought
Arrogant
Away
Position
Impressed
Much
Since
According
Never
Beauty
Therefore
Like
Possible
Completely
Clich
People
Known
Youth
Overwhelmed
Society
Type
Invent

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When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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.
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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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Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
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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.
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
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What is a political party but a conspiracy?
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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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That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
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We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.
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I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
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It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
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