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

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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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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.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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Politics is made up of two words: Poli, which is Greek for many, and tics, which are bloodsucking insects.
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I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
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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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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
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Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
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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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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
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There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.
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