A Quote by Gore Vidal

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

Gore Vidal

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Any Art Careers Contemplation Else Kind Literary Literary Theory Literature Prefer Teach Tend Tenure Theory Writers

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Gore Vidal
American - Writer
October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012

I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do.

Kola Boof

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Dave Brubeck

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

Neil Gaiman

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

William Faulkner

[On the writers she admires:] I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties.

Fran Lebowitz

Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

You can't teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

Benjamin Percy

I would prefer to have a more appealing job. If I could still change careers, I would prefer it. This unfortunate art is made for long beards and ugly faces rather than for a relatively well-endowed woman.

Camille Claudel

I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.

Pankaj Mishra

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

Terry Pratchett

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Audre Lorde

In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.

Hallgrimur Helgason

I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers.

Pankaj Mishra

I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.

Jim Morrison

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

Renata Adler

We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain. I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it's good, we know that it is bad, but because there isn't any other. Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact.

Jerome Lejeune

A Quote by Gore Vidal

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