Gore Vidal (1925–2012,) originally Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., was an American novelist, essayist, dramatist, and polemicist. A frequent guest on television opinion programs, he was also celebrated for his outspoken political opinions and his witty and satirical observations.
Vidal was born in West Point, New York. His first novel, Williwaw (1946,) was based on his experiences serving in the United States Army Reserve Corps during World War II. The City and the Pillar (1948,) a candid account of homosexuality, was a bestseller.
Vidal established himself as a novelist with satirical comedies such as Myra Breckenridge (1968,) its sequel Myron (1974,) and Creation (1981.) His political novels include Washington D.C. (1967,) and the trilogy Burr (1976,) 1876 (1976,) and Lincoln (1984.)
Vidal was also an actor and wrote for television, film, and the stage. A writer of teleplays, he turned briefly to the theatre in 1957 and wrote the successful adaptations Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960,) a satire on American politics.
Vidal’s plays include On the March to the Sea (1961,) Weekend (1968,) and An Evening with Richard Nixon and… (1972.) His memoirs are Palimpsest (1995) and Point to Point Navigation (2006.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gore Vidal
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Democracy
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Charm
In 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.
—Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Wealth, Money
Never have children, only grand children.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Praise, Audiences
For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Photography
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
—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
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Men
I am, at heart, a tiresome nag complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Advice
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
—Gore Vidal
What is a long life but a nightmare of endless repetition?
—Gore Vidal
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children
It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Power
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Friendship, Envy
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
—Gore Vidal
Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Style
It makes no difference whom you vote for — the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
—Gore Vidal
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Advertising
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Twentieth Century
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Taxes, Class, Government
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Religion
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.
—Gore Vidal
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Pleasure
When Ronald Reagan’s career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.
—Gore Vidal
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.
—Gore Vidal
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