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The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

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
Failure
Living
Confessors
True
Wrongness
Self
Pettiness
Life
Mostly
Exists
Aware
Drama

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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.
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.
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No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
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Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.
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Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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I'm in favor of sexual encounters.
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You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.
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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 have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
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Never offend an enemy in a small way.
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I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
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There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.
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