Gore Vidal Quotes

I always spoke my mind. I didn't go with the flow.

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

I've never thought of it consciously... I say exactly what I think, and very often it's totally politically incorrect. I get, always, chastised for it. So it's not shtick. But I think I'm the one who says, 'The emperor has no clothes.'

I'm against fashionable thinking.

I always do things that are not the flavour of the season. And that's why people like me.

What I do doesn't sit well in the world of hipsterville. I don't have a cool card, but I also don't have thin skin.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

We have never considered our brand superior or inferior to any other one, and we have never spoken about our work in comparison to anyone else's. We are ourselves; we have never had the presumption to please everyone, but we believe in the utmost liberty to express oneself.

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

I think some people like me because I'm different. I don't think like everybody else. People are so tied up in the worst parts of technology these days. They live a life pressing buttons. They don't use their imaginations.

For all the oddballs and misfits out there, eventually, if you just follow your path, you will reach somewhere no one else has. You are uniquely meant to do something that only you can do.

I'd rather have people dislike my style than change it. If someone says, 'Hey, Yngwie, you play too damn much,' I don't care. They way I play is the way I like to play. If people like it, great. If they don't, it's still fine with me.

Wake-up! Think for yourself, be yourself and return to what is real.

My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed with them because, again, I don't care too much what other people think.

I just tend to admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and just say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them. I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". It's a fine line.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

I thought weirdness was a good thing. I don't mean that defensively, either. I thought it was something to be cultivated.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.