Daily Inspiration Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal lands the dagger where the applause is loudest: competence. The line isn’t anti-theater so much as anti-complacency, a warning that the stage can become a high-end factory for low-stakes product. “Continual reminders” implies an industry with amnesia built into its business model; every new season resets the moral ledger, and success itself becomes the sedative. The true threat isn’t failure or vulgarity. It’s polished, professional emptiness.

The phrase “debasing” is doing serious work. Vidal suggests that making art is not merely about craft but about dignity, and dignity can be traded away in incremental choices: safe scripts, crowd-pleasing revivals, performances that showcase virtuosity while dodging risk. His target is the kind of prestige that launders triviality. When “those who do well” are rewarded for work “not worth doing,” the institution teaches everyone else what to value: not urgency, not truth, but survivable entertainment.

Context matters. Vidal came up in a midcentury American culture where theater competed with Hollywood, television, and Broadway’s increasing commercial pressures. He also lived through an era when “serious” art was expected to justify itself against mass culture. This sentence is his snobbishness sharpened into a civic argument: the theater has a public function, and when it squanders that function elegantly, it degrades more than its own standards. It degrades the audience’s appetite for meaning.