Quote

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

Gore Vidal

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gore Vidal
Age: 86 †
Born: 1925
Born: October 3
Died: 2012
Died: July 31
Actor
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
West Point
New York
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Gor Vidal
Cameron Kay
Eugene Luther Vidal
Edgar Box
Katherine Everard
Eugene Vidal
Ideally
Greedy
Writer
Audience
Understand
Inspirational
Needs
Immodest

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Image
The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
Gore Vidal
Image
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
Gore Vidal
Image
Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
Gore Vidal
Image
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
Gore Vidal
Image
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
Gore Vidal
Image
Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
Gore Vidal
Image
There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
Gore Vidal
Image
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
Gore Vidal
Image
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.
Gore Vidal
Image
Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
Gore Vidal
Image
CO₂ emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.
Gore Vidal
Image
We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
Gore Vidal
Image
The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
Gore Vidal
Image
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.
Gore Vidal
Image
Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
Gore Vidal
Image
If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
Gore Vidal
Image
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
Gore Vidal
Image
In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.
Gore Vidal
Image
Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Gore Vidal
Image
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
Gore Vidal