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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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
Friends
Happiness
True
Enough
Must
Fail
Oneself
Failing
Successful
More quotes by Gore Vidal
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
Gore Vidal
Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
Gore Vidal
No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.
Gore Vidal
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Gore Vidal
In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
Gore Vidal
Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Gore Vidal
I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system tones you up.
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
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
Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
Gore Vidal
Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
Gore Vidal
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
Gore Vidal
Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
Gore Vidal
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
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
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
Gore Vidal
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
Gore Vidal
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
Gore Vidal
I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.
Gore Vidal
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
Gore Vidal
