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What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
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
Either
Seldom
Denied
Seasons
Changes
More quotes by Gore Vidal
It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
Gore Vidal
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
Gore Vidal
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
Gore Vidal
I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
Gore Vidal
Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
Gore Vidal
...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.
Gore Vidal
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
Gore Vidal
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
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
There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
Gore Vidal
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
Gore Vidal
The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
Gore Vidal
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Gore Vidal
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
Gore Vidal
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
Gore Vidal
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
Gore Vidal
