Gore Vidal Quotes

We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got th...

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can'...

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ough...

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in th...

I'm a born-again atheist.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This i...

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues an...

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We als...

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

I have never been an eavesdropper, even in childhood. Not from any sense of virtue but because I rea...

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political...

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence t...

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualifi...

Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since D...

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself a...

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience al...

It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is ho...

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...

Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destro...

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way i...

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness...

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take ...

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fi...

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect f...

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose....

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as ...

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes...

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and mo...

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexu...

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courag...

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing...

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym An...

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, ...

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't pl...

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon th...

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perce...

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism...

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like th...

Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us ...

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exi...

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fr...

Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Pr...

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes i...

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking tha...

[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and...

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself m...

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more s...

Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe a...

Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.

The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. N...

Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and...

It is ironic-rouse the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as...

A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich d...

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic ...

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small Amer...

...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in parti...

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us th...

Since nothing is free, to each his price.