"The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge."
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Quote collection
Gore Vidal quotes (page 8 of 23)
457 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts."
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"What is a political party but a conspiracy?"
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"Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age."
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"All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious."
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"I liked the trichotomy, that's the only thing I ever liked."
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"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60."
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"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith."
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"Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."
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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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"All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world."
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"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."
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"I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."
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"That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences."
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"I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool."
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"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death."
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"I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place"
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"To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun."
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"I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging."
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"Love is a fan club with only two fans."
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