This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for their bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Darkness | Death | Defeat | Earth | Failure | Hope | Life | Life | Light | Love | Mystery | Nothing | Power | Reading | Sadness | Will | Failure |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty
Time |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
Love |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.
Evidence | Inconvenient | Love | Means | Will |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I did think of marrying once, and I explained it on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ in 1968. It was right after those debates with Bill Buckley during the conventions. I told Cavett that I once planned to marry Joanne Woodward. ‘What went wrong?’ Cavett asked. I told him that Joanne met Paul Newman and I met Bill Buckley.
Love | Understand |
I often think of the beautiful Turin, where sweet must feel to live.
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.
Poetry |
Thick white cloud of moths crazy swirls around the dull lights and on the parapets lays down a blanket on which scricchia like sugar on the footÂ… and the water continues to gnaw the banks and more no one is innocent.
Poetry |