Gore Vidal Quotes

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

We take literature too seriously.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

I grew up reading a lot on literature and all of that.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.