Gore Vidal Quotes

Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?

To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.

I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major

No, not death. We have chosen life eternal, the resurrection of the ... '
'That is a story to tell children. The truth is that for thousands of years we looked to what was living. Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters. Only there is no next world.

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society ... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.

Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were
illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end ... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved

My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money - and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse. I suppose, if nothing else, I was

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.

When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.
Twitter post, July 29, 2012

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party ... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.

Is it not better for a man never to have been born?"
"Certaintly not" The response was brisk. "Just to be able to study the sky is reason enough to be alive."
"Unfortunately, I can't see the sky."
"Then listen to music.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system; tones you up.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

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

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

I have never been an eavesdropper, even in childhood. Not from any sense of virtue but because I really do not want to know what people think of me or, to be precise, what they say of me - often a different matter. I can usually imagine the unpleasant judgements, for we are what others needs us to be. That is why our reputations change so often and so drastically, reflecting no particular change in us, merely a change in the mood of those who observe us.

We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act.

To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

We're not a democracy.

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is-yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos.

I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.

In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society - that is decadence.

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

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.

"Well!" A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. "What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?"

"The Vauxhall Gardens, I should think." My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. Yet I stare at him with fascination; note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard's catching flies.

"Of the delicious nymphs you sport with there?"

"Of the delicious fauns, too - and their goatish friends."

"Uh-huh..." A long, drawn-out attempt at sounding amused failed of its object. "I hope you realize that your editor's unholy passion for the Negro grows more embarrassing each day. If I were he I should beware. He might simply vanish one dark night."

"Murdered? Or sold into slavery?" Clancey recently delighted his admirers by proposing that since the institution of slavery has been an integral part of every high civilization (and peculiarly well-adapted to those nations that follow the word as well as the spirit of Old and New Testaments), poor whites should be bought and sold as well as blacks.

"I don't believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the bazaar. Only his diseased mind would have a certain morbid interest to the special collector. You, on the o

Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better ... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

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

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.

The tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crackup of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above.

I'm a born-again atheist.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.

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

Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself.

[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.

'Politics' is made up of two words, 'poli,' which is Greek for 'many,' and 'tics,' which are blood-sucking insects.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Forget the Bush family, they are the most negligible family in the country. They are unintelligent, they are reasonably decorative, they are obedient to the great economic powers. Nixon said something interesting to Murray Kempton about Bush senior when he became President. Murray and Nixon used to have lunch, and when Murray said, "Well, what is this Bush like?" Nixon said, "Oh, nothing, nothing there, just a lightweight. He's the sort of person you appoint to things, like the U.N., the CIA. But that Barbara Bush, she's really something; she's really vindictive!" - which was the highest complement that Nixon could deliver.

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That's why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.

If ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a homegrown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: 'Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he's bad news, but you can't hurt people's feelings. They buy soap, too.

I think we're going to have to accept the fact the U.S. is off the world map. We are not a great player any longer. And when we come home - as we will have to do because we've run out of money - we will discover that Argentine debts means Argentine politics. And on that note, you can wake up in the middle of the night.

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

Country is run by ... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.

Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.