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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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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
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I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
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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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Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
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A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don't know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.
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[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
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If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
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France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
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There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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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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Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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