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All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

Gore Vidal

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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
Still
Able
Years
Alphabet
Ambitious
Americans
Hundred
Read
Stills

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France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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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.
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One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
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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.
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Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
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That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
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The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
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The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
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We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
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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.
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If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
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Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
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We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.
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Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
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In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
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All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
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