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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

— Gore Vidal Preface to Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)

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Preface to Sex, Death, and Money (1969)

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Poetry

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?

Julian (1964)

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.

Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972)

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Julian (1964)

All Gore Vidal quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gore Vidal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.