Gore Vidal Writing Quotations

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

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.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

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

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

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.~

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view.

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.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.

A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.

The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

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).

I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.