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
want serious fiction
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
thinking keys challenges
I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
natural ritual
Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.
real opposites want
I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.
sex blood tyrants
Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not the affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
people enemy inward
Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.
giving-up sky religion
This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
bisexual practice people
Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
two perfect dollars
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
writing thinking class
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
mean nouveau-riche said
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
funny sex two
There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
country love-you mean
You will be favorable to Burr, and so must fail, because the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth, Washington the greatest man that ever lived, Burr the wickedest, and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader's attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.
art politics triumph
Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art.