Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidalwas an American writerand a public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 October 1925
CityWest Point, NY
CountryUnited States of America
enemy curious
It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.
play fiction masturbation
Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.
america rome europe
I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.
family suffering together
The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
sex enjoy relation
Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.
novelists poet imitation
Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.
lying writing people
If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.
sex gentleman matter
Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
love unbearable sense-of-humor
Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
literature assuming reasonable
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.
movie stars born
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
country war temper
You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
doors house lust
In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
politician believer improvisation
In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.