Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
GORE VIDALCertainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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 -
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
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He who is last had best laugh.
GORE VIDAL -
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
GORE VIDAL -
Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
GORE VIDAL -
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
GORE VIDAL -
It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
GORE VIDAL -
I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
GORE VIDAL -
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
GORE VIDAL -
We’re not a democracy.
GORE VIDAL -
Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
GORE VIDAL -
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL -
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
GORE VIDAL -
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL