12 Gore Vidal Quotes on Writing

Gore Vidal quotes on writing

12. In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.

21. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

22. Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

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

29. Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

36. 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). [1]

37. Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anais in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.

55. Somebody was here the other day from BBC Radio. It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

57. I went into a line of work in which jealousy is the principal emotion between practitioners. I don't think I ever suffered from it, because there was no need. But I was aware of it in others, and I found it a regrettable fault.

58. There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

59. You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

76. For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, 'It's existential.' He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.