Quote

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

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
Reader
Balzac
Choose
Outlast
Writer
Essay
Novel
Essays
Thousand
Survive
Least
Communication
Others
Direct
Years
Meaning
Montaigne

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Image
One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
Gore Vidal
Image
First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
Gore Vidal
Image
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
Gore Vidal
Image
Never offend an enemy in a small way.
Gore Vidal
Image
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
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
I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system tones you up.
Gore Vidal
Image
[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
Image
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Gore Vidal
Image
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
Gore Vidal
Image
The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
Gore Vidal
Image
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal
Image
As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
Gore Vidal
Image
I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
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
The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
Gore Vidal
Image
I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.
Gore Vidal
Image
Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.
Gore Vidal
Image
Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
Image
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
Gore Vidal