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[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
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
Energy
Combined
Place
John
Capote
Self
Particularly
Worships
Made
Worship
Truman
Like
Confidence
York
Incompetence
City
Paranoid
Cities
Simon
More quotes by Gore Vidal
There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
Gore Vidal
The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
Gore Vidal
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal
One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
Gore Vidal
In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
Gore Vidal
Politics is made up of two words: Poli, which is Greek for many, and tics, which are bloodsucking insects.
Gore Vidal
Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
Gore Vidal
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
Gore Vidal
...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.
Gore Vidal
I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
Gore Vidal
Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
Gore Vidal
Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
Gore Vidal
The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.
Gore Vidal
Having no talent is no longer enough.
Gore Vidal
I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
Gore Vidal
