I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
Interpretation
Gore Vidal emphasizes the importance of a specific writing routine and medium that resonates with his creative process.
In this quote, Gore Vidal reflects on his approach to writing fiction, highlighting the simplicity and authenticity of writing longhand on yellow legal pads in the morning. By comparing his method to that of Richard Nixon, he invokes a sense of nostalgia and seriousness, suggesting that the act of writing is both a disciplined craft and a personal ritual that allows for creative expression.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to inspire students about the creative process.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure.
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