Gore Vidal Quotes

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Gore Vidal

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 3, 1925

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

Gore Vidal

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

Gore Vidal

McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.

Gore Vidal

I'm always an optimist!

Gore Vidal

Gossip is conversation about people.

Gore Vidal

What I like least about myself is my belligerence.

Gore Vidal

There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.

Gore Vidal

If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.

Gore Vidal

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

Gore Vidal

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

Gore Vidal

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.

Gore Vidal

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

Gore Vidal

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.

Gore Vidal

I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.

Gore Vidal

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

Gore Vidal

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

Gore Vidal

No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?

Gore Vidal

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Gore Vidal

Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.

Gore Vidal