author
, playwright
, essayist, screenwriter
, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar
(1948), outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality
. He also ran for political office twice and has been a longtime political critic.
Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York
, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal
(1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–1978).
I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.
In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.
That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.
Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.