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If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.

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
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More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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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Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
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The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
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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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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
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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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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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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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Realism has always been called cynicism.
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Never offend an enemy in a small way.
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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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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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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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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.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.
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It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
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