 |
Authors & Writing
|
|
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
Criticism
|
|
|
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
(Gore Vidal writing about the critic Edmund Wilson)
-Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books, 1993
|
|
Democracy
|
|
|
"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."
-Gore Vidal
|
|
Envy / Jealousy
|
|
|
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
-Gore Vidal, "quoted in Sunday Times Magazine (London)", September 16, 1973
|
|
Government
|
|
|
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."
-Gore Vidal
|
|
Media
|
|
|
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...
-Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
|
|
Photography
|
|
|
For half a century, photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
-Gore Vidal
|
|
Presidency
|
|
|
"When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags."
-Gore Vidal, Armageddon? (essay), 1987
|
|
Sex
|
|
|
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
-Gore Vidal, In Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays 1952-1972 (1974). “Norman Mailer’s Self-Advertisements,” Nation (New York, Jan. 2, 1960)
|
|
Speeches (oratory)
|
|
|
All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven't done anything yet, and I think it's just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
|
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
Wealth
|
|
|
"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."
-Gore Vidal
|
Books by and about Gore Vidal
