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[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.

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
Murder
Anthology
American
Masturbation
Rather
Darkest
Believe
Homosexuality
Think
Traits
Thinking
Essentially
Believes
Mailer
Sexual
Norman

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The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
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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.
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Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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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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Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
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Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
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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.
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Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
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Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
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These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
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If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
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I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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