Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it. "

Gore Vidal

Job

Writing

Myself

" As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use. "

" To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down. "

" 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

Military

Said

" I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams. "

" The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so. "

" All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world. "

" I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst. "

" Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external. "

" In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders. "

" Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice. "

" 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. "

" It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars. "

" There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all. "

" Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. "

" Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again. "

" Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. "

" By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over. "

Gore Vidal

Man

Been

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

" What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist. "

Gore Vidal

Realist

World

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

" To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights. "

" The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. "

" 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. "

" There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices. "

" What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives. "

" 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. "