Gore Vidal: Likeness

“Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.”

Gore Vidal

Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s

History , Past , Hope

“To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”

Gore Vidal

Source: At Home: Essays 1982-1988

“You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

Gore Vidal

Perfection

“Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.”

Gore Vidal

On the religious right in America http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

Money , People , Fear , Religion

“The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.”

Gore Vidal

"William Dean Howells" (1983)
1980s, At Home (1988)

World , Education , Past , Painting

“I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 2: Fire Over England, p. 34

Nature

“It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U. S. A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus—due process of law—and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere!”

Gore Vidal

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

War , Law , Lovers , Hell

“You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives.”

Gore Vidal

On the Republican Party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD0p-wfCARk&feature=youtu.be&t=46s
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

Love , Money , War , Thinking

“Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money!
Two things that they worship.
You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.”

Gore Vidal

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

Money , Democracy

“We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

Gore Vidal

"The State of the Union," The Nation (13 September 2004)
2000s

Law , Dead

“What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom’s land much less bravery’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.”

Gore Vidal

"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Age , School , Color , Home

“Well, remember, all that area from which the Gore family comes was solid Democrat and progressive under Roosevelt for several decades. So they just didn't become Republicans because they all wanted to be bankers. They became it because they didn't like black people, and they thought the Democrats were pushing integration too fast. And that's how the great split came about, to the shame of the whole country.”

Gore Vidal

On the American South's switch from Democrat to Republican http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

People , Family , Country

“To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 1: The Prince and the Pauper, pp.2-3

“In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.”

Gore Vidal

"French Letters: Theories of the New Novel" (1967)
1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978)

God , Books , Silence , Time

“Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

Gore Vidal

The Times Online http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece, (30 September 2009)
2000s

People , Thinking

“…American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

Gore Vidal

"Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

Gore Vidal

Preface to Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship http://books.google.com/books?id=LXFbAAAAMAAJ&q="There+is+something+about+a+bureaucrat+that+does+not+like+a+poem" (1969)
Preface to Sex, Death, and Money http://books.google.com/books?id=54JBAAAAIAAJ&q="There+is+something+about+a+bureaucrat+that+does+not+like+a+poem" (1969)
1960s