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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.

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
Politics
United
Away
States
Must
Rise
Subject
Subjects
Stay

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Christianity is such a silly religion.
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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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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
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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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My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general (They tell lies, he used to say with wonder, even when they don't have to).
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I look into my own black heart.
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I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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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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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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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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Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.
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Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
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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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Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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