Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

Happy 82nd birthday to the wonderful Gore Vidal, man of letters, ardent critic of the Reagan and Bush administrations of America, and elegant wit.

Born into a socialite family, Gore Vidal was destined to mix in the most erudite of circles, his early relationships included Anais Nin, and he was good friends with the Kennedy family. His ground-breaking homosexual-themed novel The City and the Pillar caused controversy in late 1940s America, and his later Myra Breckenridge (a transgender satire) was later made into a cult film starring Raquel Welch and Mae West.

His TV clash with right-wing writer William Buckley was notorious for its evident hatred between the debaters, and on Buckley's death Vidal said "hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred". Ouch!

Some more examples of this deadly waspish wit:

• A good deed never goes unpunished.
• A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
• Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
• Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
• Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
• As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
• By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
• Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
• Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
• I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
• I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
• It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
• Never have children, only grandchildren.
• Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
• Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
• Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
• Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
• The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
• Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
• 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.
• What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
• Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Happy birthday to the original classy bitch!

Gore Vidal biography