Aging & Wisdom Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s complaint isn’t that modern people love facts; it’s that they’ve turned “facts” into a fetish, a badge of seriousness that exempts them from thinking. The line works because it flips an assumption most of us carry around unexamined: that the factual is automatically virtuous and the imaginative is automatically slippery. Vidal, a novelist who lived for the knife-fight between history and story, is pointing at a cultural shortcut: if something arrives dressed as data, documentation, or reportage, we lower our guard. If it arrives as fiction, we demand proofs it was never meant to provide.

The subtext is a jab at a society that mistakes verification for understanding. A “suspect” fact can be technically real and still be useless or manipulative when stripped of meaning, pattern, or moral interpretation. Meanwhile an “imaginative exercise” can be “true” in the older sense Vidal prized: psychologically accurate, politically diagnostic, capable of describing how power actually feels and moves. He’s defending art not as escapism, but as an instrument for telling the truth when the record is incomplete, biased, or strategically curated.

Context matters: Vidal spent decades skewering American mythmaking, from patriotic pageantry to the way official narratives sanitize violence and ambition. Coming from him, this is also an indictment of media and politics: institutions that launder conjecture into “fact” while dismissing novels, satire, and metaphor as mere entertainment. It’s Vidal at his most elegant and irritated: reminding us that the age’s supposed realism can be its most successful delusion.