You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
GORE VIDALIn America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
-
-
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
GORE VIDAL -
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
GORE VIDAL -
Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
GORE VIDAL -
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 -
I can understand companionship.
GORE VIDAL -
Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
GORE VIDAL -
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
GORE VIDAL -
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL -
Love is not my bag.
GORE VIDAL -
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
GORE VIDAL -
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
GORE VIDAL -
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
GORE VIDAL -
There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
GORE VIDAL -
Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
GORE VIDAL -
I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
GORE VIDAL