Quote

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

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
Mysterious
Constant
Talent
Given
Best
Must
Kind
Make
Improve

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Image
Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
Gore Vidal
Image
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
Gore Vidal
Image
Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
Gore Vidal
Image
It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
Gore Vidal
Image
Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal
Image
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
Gore Vidal
Image
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
Gore Vidal
Image
Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
Gore Vidal
Image
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
Gore Vidal
Image
A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
Gore Vidal
Image
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.
Gore Vidal
Image
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
Gore Vidal
Image
What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
Gore Vidal
Image
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.
Gore Vidal
Image
Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
Gore Vidal
Image
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
Gore Vidal
Image
Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.
Gore Vidal
Image
Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.
Gore Vidal
Image
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
Gore Vidal
Image
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Gore Vidal