Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

American Author, Playwright, Essayist, Screenwriter and Political Activist

"I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities."

"I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing. The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of timeÂ’s mystery and a manÂ’s love of life."

"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)."

"I have found that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough."

"I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery."

"I lived with Howard for fifty years, but what we had was certainly not romantic love, not passionate love. And it certainly was nonsexual. Try and explain that to the fags."

"I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn t photograph them."

"I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place"

"I met a lot of people, but I didn't get to know them."

"I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger."

"I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow."

"I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery."

"I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass."

"I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."

"I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not."

"I was the meanest kid on the block."

"I went into a line of work in which jealousy is the principal emotion between practitioners. I don't think I ever suffered from it, because there was no need. But I was aware of it in others, and I found it a regrettable fault."

"IÂ’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you donÂ’t. Move on and move out."

"I wasn't like everyone, you know. What everyone did, I was sure not to do."

"I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track."

"If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well."

"If itÂ’s a battle between the Gores and the Bushes, the Gores will win. We are much meaner and cleverer. And we have more popular support."

"Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none."

"If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing."

"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."

"If we succeed in cleaning up the environment, we donÂ’t have enough money for war. But Americans are basically pro-war. WeÂ’re a violent people and we like it."

"If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very we'll within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature."

"If you let people break your spirit and detour you from your path, then you have not been true to yourself or those you're here to touch, those who believe in you."

"If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics."

"I'm a born-again atheist."

"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."

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

"I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary."

"I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out."

"In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling."

"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."

"In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death"

"In general. . . novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries."

"In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed."

"In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

"In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all."

"In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously."

"It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time-now, too, I suppose-actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness."

"In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it."

"It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us."

"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."

"It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead."

"It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made."

"It is not enough merely to win; others must lose."