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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.

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
Lives
Portrayed
Work
Assumed
Would
Victims
Victim
Large
Fiction
Serious
Realistically
Audience
Oddly

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You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
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Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.
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I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
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CO₂ emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.
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The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
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Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
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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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Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
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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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The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
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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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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.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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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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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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Terrorism is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.
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Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
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