Quote

I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.

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
Things
Enemy
Magazine
Time
United
Establishment
People
Times
Magazines
Didn
Extremely
States
Particularly
Firsts
York
First
Took
Unpopular
Always
Position
Positions

More quotes by 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
You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.
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
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
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal
Image
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Gore Vidal
Image
You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
Image
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Gore Vidal
Image
There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
Gore Vidal
Image
I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
Gore Vidal
Image
The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
Gore Vidal
Image
The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
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
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
To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.
Gore Vidal
Image
These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
Gore Vidal
Image
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
Gore Vidal
Image
Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
Gore Vidal
Image
If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
Gore Vidal
Image
[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.
Gore Vidal