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
memories bridges acting
Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.
memories character mean
Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.
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.
happened impression rather settles
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
capital classical death hour offense speculate
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.
ahead city pointed
That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.
based british colonial empire french maintained modern money paris power shifted three
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.
fervent foe hudson tap whether
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
bodies national
In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
discovery manage obvious state
I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.
american-novelist andy genius
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
betrays night wedding
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
next sam script worked
During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.
cannot deprive happiness life pursuit somebody
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.