Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s line is a neat little sabotage of the romantic myth that good work is born of purity, contemplation, or moral hygiene. “In writing and politicking” yokes two arenas we like to keep separate: art and governance. He’s insisting they run on the same fuel - instinct, appetite, timing - and that overthinking is just self-flattery dressed up as seriousness. The phrase “it’s best not to think about it” isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-scruple: a jab at the writer who worships process and the politician who worships principle when both are really chasing outcomes.

The subtext is Vidal’s favorite accusation: that public virtue is often performance, and so is literary virtue. “Just do it” carries a deliberately unglamorous American bluntness, like a slap to the face of preciousness. He’s mocking the paralysis that comes from worrying whether you’re “allowed” to say something, whether it will be admired, whether it will compromise your brand. Action, he implies, is the only honest unit of measure; the rest is press release.

Context matters. Vidal lived as a permanent insider-outsider in U.S. letters and politics: elite, connected, and relentlessly suspicious of the country’s self-mythologizing. He ran for office, sparred on television, wrote historical novels that treated power as theater, and watched ideology harden into marketing. The sentence reads like field advice from someone who has seen that hesitation is a luxury, and that in both novels and campaigns, momentum is the real intelligence.