Gore Vidal - 1925-2012
“Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.”
Remembering the writer Gore Vidal with some of his best quotes.
American author and political commentator Gore Vidal died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. Throughout his career, he published 25 novels and more than 200 essays, but the novel for which he was most famous was his third, The City and The Pillar, published in 1948 when he was 23. It was said to be the “first serious American homosexual novel,” and it caused a furore for its depiction of an athletic young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. Society was so homophobic at the time that Gore was forced to write under pseudonyms for years following the novel’s publication.
Vidal ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice, but was widely respected in the U.S. as a political commentator, and as the last century’s “finest essayist.”
“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”
—R.I.P. Gore Vidal. You will be missed.
(via theparisreview:)
