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" I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.' "

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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. "

Gore Vidal

Republican

Party

Two

" What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives. "

" The unfed mind devours itself. "

Gore Vidal

Mind

Itself

" In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative. "

" Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there. "

" The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining. "

" A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive. "

Gore Vidal

Say

Moment

" Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. "

" I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters. "

" I'm always an optimist! "

Gore Vidal

Optimist

Always

" It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally. "

" Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. "

" To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights. "

" As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use. "

" You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers? "

" In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas. "

" Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. "

" You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right. "

" As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. "

" Does one ever read a politician's books? "

" The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die. "

Gore Vidal

Race

Time

" I am not, at heart, a playwright. "

Gore Vidal

Playwright

Heart

" Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing. "

Gore Vidal

Beginnings

Kind

" Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East. "

" A narcissist is someone better looking than you are. "

" The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale. "

" Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House. "

" To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds. "

" I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936. "