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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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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
War
Another
Country
Temper

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
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I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system tones you up.
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Realism has always been called cynicism.
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The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
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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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Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
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It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.
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Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.
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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
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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.
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Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.
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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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The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything.
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