Gore Vidal Quotes

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Gore Vidal

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 3, 1925

I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.

Gore Vidal

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Gore Vidal

I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.

Gore Vidal

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.

Gore Vidal

Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.

Gore Vidal

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Gore Vidal

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

Gore Vidal

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

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

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

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Gore Vidal

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

Gore Vidal

I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

Gore Vidal

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.

Gore Vidal

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

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

Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'

Gore Vidal

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

Gore Vidal

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Gore Vidal

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 Vidal