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Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

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
Spent
Taking
Lives
Masks
Mask
Putting

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
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Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
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I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
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There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
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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.
Gore Vidal
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I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
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I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
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Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.
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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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Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
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When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'
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I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings one is Democrat and the other is Republican.
Gore Vidal
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The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
Gore Vidal
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Gore Vidal
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It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
Gore Vidal
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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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In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
Gore Vidal
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Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
Gore Vidal