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
grandparent phrenology belief
I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.
stars writing want
I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~
birthday perfect progress
As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
country religious fundamentals
I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
doe rebellious bureaucracy
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
art real writing
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
firsts discouraging finished
I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.
memories father mean
I would be literally patrician in the sense that the senators in ancient Rome were called conscript fathers, paters, from which comes the word patrician. So if you come from a senatorial family, you are literally patrician in that sense, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't be Billy Carter, you know, of recent memory.
writing alcohol bedtime
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
taken gossip truth-is
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
sex writing fiction
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
pointless-things things-to-do pointless
Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.
finding-the-one car literature
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
thinking years numbers
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.