Quote

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

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
Principles
Heuristics
Way
History
Present
Premonition
Experience
Recreate
Stories
Books
Germans
Past
Possible
Integrated
Book
Word
Principle
Without
Ability
Tried
Must
Story
Weight
Heuristic
Writing
Natural

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Image
There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Gore Vidal
Image
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.
Gore Vidal
Image
If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
Gore Vidal
Image
a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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
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
The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
Gore Vidal
Image
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
Image
We must declare ourselves, become known allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Gore Vidal
Image
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Gore Vidal
Image
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
Gore Vidal
Image
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir (I am not my own subject, I used to say with icy superiority).
Gore Vidal
Image
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
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
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 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.
Gore Vidal
Image
From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.
Gore Vidal
Image
I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
Gore Vidal
Image
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal