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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
Self
Particularly
Capote
Made
Worship
Worships
Like
Confidence
Truman
York
Incompetence
City
Paranoid
Cities
Simon
More quotes by Gore Vidal
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
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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.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
Gore Vidal
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
Gore Vidal
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
It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.
Gore Vidal
Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
Gore Vidal
Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
Gore Vidal
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
Gore Vidal
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal
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
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
Gore Vidal
One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
Gore Vidal
People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Gore Vidal
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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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
Gore Vidal