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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
Seldom
Denied
Seasons
Changes
Either

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Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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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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Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
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Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
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As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
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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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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
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Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
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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.
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I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
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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.
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I'm in favor of sexual encounters.
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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.
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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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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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Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
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In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.
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