Words Never Failed Him

The always entertaining, often outrageous, frequently exasperating Gore Vidal. I wish he were still in the world.  Gawd bless him, he was Gore Vidal until the very end.





“We are the United States of Amnesia....We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

The United States is a place where "the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

On being the godfather of one of the children of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins: "Always a godfather, never a god."

After being punched by Norman Mailer because of a bad review, "Once again, words fail Mr. Mailer."

Ronald Reagan?  "A triumph of the embalmer's art."


On Edmund White: "He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after."


Asked whether his first sexual experience had been heterosexual or homosexual, Vidal answered, "I didn't think it was polite to ask."


There seems to be pretty much a unanimous consensus that Vidal will be remembered for his essays, more than for his novels (or plays or screenplays), and I suspect that is true.


The following is the opening paragraph of a 1963 book-length essay, Tarzan Revisited:

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking. Fascinated as we all are to know what our countrymen think of great issues (approving, disapproving,'don't-knowing,' with that same shrewd intelligence which made a primeval wilderness bloom with Howard Johnson signs), the  pollsters never get around to asking the sort of interesting personal questions our new-Athenians might be able to answer knowledgeably. For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads?"