black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

Gore Vidal

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
GORE VIDAL

Dream Myself Writing
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
GORE VIDAL

Anxiety Night Youth
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
GORE VIDAL

Business Country Faith Fiction Lost Writing
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
GORE VIDAL

Bank Loyalty President
The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
GORE VIDAL

Race Teacher Writing
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
GORE VIDAL

Age Believe Exercise Imagination Spirit
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
GORE VIDAL

Government Need People Philosophy Religion
It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
GORE VIDAL

Change Reality Time Torture Victim
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
GORE VIDAL

Essential Experience Literature Natural Work
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
GORE VIDAL

Children Expectation Forever
I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
GORE VIDAL

Adventure Movie Myself Novel Operation Play Sphere Temporary
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
GORE VIDAL

Children Country Famous Past Time
When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
GORE VIDAL

Myself President Thinking
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL

Hope Newspaper Oneself People Reading
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
GORE VIDAL

Beginning Europe Ourselves Sun
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
GORE VIDAL

Elimination Management Media Object Opinion World

After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Gore Vidal Quotes