Gore Vidal Quotes

DELTON 4: He is morally retarded and, like a child, he regards this world as his plaything.…

KRETON: War is your specialty. Historians love you for it. I love you for it. After all, not only is it fun, it’s creative! Your best scientific discoveries are made in wartime: the atom bomb, radar, luncheon meat. And think of all that travel! Getting away from home, making new acquaintances, indulging in amatory dalliance with strangers. So broadening. And then: the delirium of battle, the rush of adrenaline to the head as the trumpets sound ATTACK! Conrad, war is the principle art form of your race.

CONRAD: (Patiently) I admit sometimes we get overexcited, but nobody wants a war, because nobody wants to be killed.
KRETON: Well, every game has its penalties. I must say I would never have dreamed that one day I should be trying to convince a lower primate that he should behave like a lower primate.

POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!

ELLEN: Conrad’s a pacifist and willing to fight for it.

KRETON: My dear, you must marry him too. I’m sure the three of you would make a lovely couple.

KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully.

POWERS: Well, good morning Mr. Kreton, and how are we today?
KRETON: Absolutely wallowing in the twentieth century.

ELLEN: Of course I know you’re from another planet and all and I guess we do think an awful lot about sex, but we’re not supposed to talk about it and we only do it when nobody’s looking.
KRETON: How ravishing! These primitive taboos. You revel in public slaughter: you pay to watch two men hit one another repeatedly, yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse…too delicious!

KRETON: Well, you know how one feels about history, the glamour of the past; I expected to hear everybody talking about great events—battles, poets, that kind of thing—but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves.

I too feel hurt at the sort of reputation which hovers about my part of this venture. I cannot honestly make much of a case for myself. I played the game stolidly according to rules I abhor. But in extenuation I should like to say what many others have said before me: the theater and its writers are seriously, perhaps fatally, hampered by economic pressure. Because it costs too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. And it is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in our theater to fail is death and the author of a play which fails is regarded with much the same sympathy as the murderer of a child.

After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament: each participant confident the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish…the theater is a child’s world).

The size of the population of course has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information, literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education is too bland to hope for much change.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possess very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others.

And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth the doing.