Life's Pleasures Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal nails a whole literary ecosystem in nine words: the writer’s itch for escape, and the more socially acceptable version of the same addiction. “Take to drink” is the old romanticized doom of authorship, the bottle as muse, anesthetic, alibi. “Take to audiences” flips it into something cleaner but not necessarily healthier: the stage, the talk show, the lecture circuit, the applause line. The joke is that both are ways of not writing, or at least ways of coping with what writing does to you.

The intent is classic Vidal: a dry, patrician jab at self-mythologizing. He’s puncturing the idea that writers are pure craftsmen hunched over sentences. Many are performers in disguise, hungry for validation, or for the quick dopamine hit that a roomful of listeners can provide. The subtext is a critique of celebrity culture creeping into literary life, where the author becomes a brand and the work becomes a pretext for being seen. Audiences, like alcohol, can blur judgment. They reward the repeatable persona, not the riskier page.

Context matters because Vidal wasn’t lobbing stones from obscurity. He was a public intellectual before that job title curdled, a novelist who sparred on TV, debated politics, and understood the seductions of being quotable. The line reads as confession and indictment: he knows the thrill of the microphone, and he knows how easily it can replace the harder, lonelier task that supposedly justifies it.