“…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)

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Gore Vidal 163

American writer 1925–2012

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“I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.”

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“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

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“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.”

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Context: If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.

“A strategic use of black culture could help generate a more efficient use of American democracy, and democracy more effectively practiced could then produce a genuinely spiritual nation of people.”

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“The grammar of Panini is one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever seen, and no other country can produce any grammatical system at all comparable to it, either for originality of plan or analytical subtlety.”

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Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Indian Wisdom https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CgBAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA172, W. H. Allen & Company, 1876, p. 172.

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Indian Wisdom https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CgBAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA172, W. H. Allen & Company, 1876, p. 172.

“Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?”

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“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

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“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Virginibus Puerisque

Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=Alw-AAAAYAAJ&q=%22You+could+read+Kant+by+yourself+if+you+wanted+but+you+must+share+a+joke+with+some+one%22+else&pg=PA17#v=onepage
Cornhill Magazine, (August 1876) http://books.google.com/books?id=VoNHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22You+could+read+Kant+by+yourself+if+you+wanted+but+you+must+share+a+joke+with+some+one+else%22&pg=PA174#v=onepage
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

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

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Gore Vidal 163

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