Write something, even if it’s a suicide note.
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Gore Vidal
Eugene Louis "Gore" Vidal (/ˌɡɔːr vᵻˈdɑːl/ October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. He was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York State, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982). As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. As such, and because he thought that men and women potentially are bisexual, Vidal rejected the adjectives "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when used as nouns, as inherently false terms used to classify and control people in society. As a novelist Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his character
There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.
No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.
Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
We are all so simple at heart that become unfathomable to one another.
Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.
Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before.
We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? Fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other,…
Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.