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Wikipedia Summary for Gore Vidal
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012), better known as Gore Vidal, was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, erudition, and patrician manner. Vidal was bisexual, and in his novels and essays interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California).
A grandson of a U.S. Senator, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.
As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories, and delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who espoused "religious tolerance" in order to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter Christianity. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores.: 94–100 In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States.
Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.
Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
Southerners make such good novelists; they have so many good stories because they have so much family.
McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.
Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.
Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity; of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything.
U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.
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.
Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
But women are always attracted to power. I do not think there could ever be a conqueror so bloody that most women would not willingly lie with him in the hope of bearing a son who would be every bit as ferocious as the father.
Country is run by... financial powers and corporate interests who send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes.
France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
But a country which can be saved only by money is a lost country anyway. After all, what is the choice, really? On the one hand: catastrophic capitalism, and on the other a capital catastrophe.
Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government).
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life john lennon is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing Nixon.
I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out.
My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general (They tell lies, he used to say with wonder, even when they don't have to).
Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.
Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters -- based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions -- would they make categories. Everybody's everything.
I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
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.
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.
Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the
American political elite from the beginning.
Presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman.
People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.
I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.
Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.
I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
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.
Do nothing that is not natural -- and ritual is natural -- and all will be for the best.
What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.
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).
From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.
As for our Ouija-board Supreme Court, it would be nice if they would take time off from holding séances with the long-dead founders, whose original intent so puzzles them, and actually examine what the founders wrought, the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.
Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
Not only are the male students drawn to violence (at second hand), they are also quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support.
Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied -- as would anybody in his position.
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
The worst thing to happen to Lincoln -- aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre -- was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.
To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be -- who else? the people of the United States.
No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?
The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.
After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.
I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party -- the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.
The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.