841 Quotes by Gore Vidal

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. New formulas just like the scientist. But that isn’t science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I’d never have written Julian if it hadn’t been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

I said, well, it’s a very primitive country, the United States, and it’s full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.

Politically, of course, it’s to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.

Since a president can do wrong and since he can be named in debate, he is not an anointed king and so like any man is answerable to the law.” John Marshall then summoned President Jefferson to Richmond.