Gore Vidal Quotes

I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.

I love all of my books. They were labors of love; I was striving to create something well done, and I do feel I succeeded.

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.

At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

Writing a book isn’t an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life’s most satisfying achievements.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.

I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.

I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals.

Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.

I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence.