Gore Vidal Want Quotations

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

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.

I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.

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.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

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.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.