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I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

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
Ordinary
Writer
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Capitol
Came
Hill
American
Background
Wells
Backgrounds
Well
Hills

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
Gore Vidal
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CO₂ emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.
Gore Vidal
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Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
Gore Vidal
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The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
Gore Vidal
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I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.
Gore Vidal
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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
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
Gore Vidal
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Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Gore Vidal
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
Gore Vidal
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I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Gore Vidal
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
Gore Vidal
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Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
Gore Vidal
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
Gore Vidal
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What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.
Gore Vidal
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
Gore Vidal
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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
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I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.
Gore Vidal