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

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.
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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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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
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From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.
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Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
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Never offend an enemy in a small way.
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Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
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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.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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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.
Gore Vidal
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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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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.
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To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
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Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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