"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
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Quote collection
Gore Vidal quotes (page 7 of 23)
457 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."
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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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"Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences."
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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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"Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land."
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"Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time."
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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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"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt - until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."
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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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"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."
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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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"That peculiarly American religion, President-worship."
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"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions."
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"The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'"
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"I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out."
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"It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends."
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"Never have children, only grandchildren."
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"I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers."
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"Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars."
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