Gore Vidal Quotes About Writing
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.~
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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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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.
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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.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
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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.
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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.
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Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.
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These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.
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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.
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A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
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The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
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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.
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