Quote

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

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
Book
Compete
First
Starts
Writing
Six
Started
Age
Read
Write
Augment
Firsts
Simultaneously

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Image
As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
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
Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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
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
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
Never offend an enemy in a small way.
Gore Vidal
Image
There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
Gore Vidal
Image
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
Gore Vidal
Image
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
Gore Vidal
Image
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
Gore Vidal
Image
I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
Gore Vidal
Image
Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
Gore Vidal
Image
In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
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
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
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
...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.
Gore Vidal
Image
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
Gore Vidal
Image
Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.
Gore Vidal