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True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

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
Wisdom
True
Wells
Well
Extent
Quite

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
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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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.
Gore Vidal
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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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Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
Gore Vidal
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Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.
Gore Vidal
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
Gore Vidal
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As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
Gore Vidal
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A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.
Gore Vidal
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The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
Gore Vidal
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Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.
Gore Vidal
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It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.
Gore Vidal
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
Gore Vidal
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By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success
Gore Vidal
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What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.
Gore Vidal
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Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.
Gore Vidal
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
Gore Vidal