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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
True
Enough
Must
Fail
Oneself
Failing
Successful
Friends
Happiness

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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
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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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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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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
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Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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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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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
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Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
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If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.
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Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
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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.
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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
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The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
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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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I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir (I am not my own subject, I used to say with icy superiority).
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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