Gore Vidal Quotes

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain. ~ Christopher Bram

It is infinitely harder to ask questions in such a way that the audience is led not to the answers (the province of the demagogue) but to new perceptions. ~ Gore Vidal

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. ~ Gore Vidal

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba. ~ Gore Vidal

Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other. ~ Gore Vidal

Since nothing is free, to each his price. ~ Gore Vidal

The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up. ~ Gore Vidal

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name. ~ Gore Vidal

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

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults. ~ Gore Vidal

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing. ~ Gore Vidal

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it. ~ Gore Vidal

I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape. ~ Gore Vidal

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age. ~ Gore Vidal

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. - GORE VIDAL ~ Richard Dawkins

The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt - the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did. ~ Gore Vidal

The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country. ~ Gore Vidal

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin. ~ Gore Vidal

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 ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink. ~ Gore Vidal

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years. ~ Gore Vidal

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more. ~ Gore Vidal

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient." ~ Gore Vidal

Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions ... ~ Gore Vidal

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?' ~ Gore Vidal

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be
at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,
but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.
It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. ~ Gore Vidal

People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia. ~ Gore Vidal

I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism. ~ Gore Vidal

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas. ~ Gore Vidal

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

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country. ~ Gore Vidal

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. ~ Gore Vidal

Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society. ~ Gore Vidal

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

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now. ~ Gore Vidal

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

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures. ~ Gore Vidal

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge ... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all. ~ Gore Vidal

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs. ~ Gore Vidal

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world. ~ Gore Vidal

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

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 ~ Gore Vidal

The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent. ~ Gore Vidal

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not. ~ Gore Vidal

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started. ~ Gore Vidal

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well. ~ Gore Vidal

... the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth ... and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader's attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness. ~ Gore Vidal

Soon he would move on. ~ Gore Vidal

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

I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view. ~ Gore Vidal

It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people. ~ Gore Vidal

We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes. ~ Gore Vidal

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. ~ Gore Vidal

I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers. ~ Gore Vidal

The constitution has broken down. We have no enemies except the ones we select and direct towards the nearest nuclear bombs. They need an enemy to provoke, a diversion. This is the mentality of tenth-rate people who are in politics because corporate America likes them. They are malleable. They give them contracts to build missile shields that will never work. It's deeply corrupt. ~ Gore Vidal

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money. ~ Gore Vidal

There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practical ways to the good life, as well as attempting to synthesize (as Iamblichos does so beautifully) all true religion in a single comprehensive system. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians. ~ Gore Vidal

Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not the affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. ~ Gore Vidal

Style ... is knowing who you are ... ~ Gore Vidal

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little. ~ Gore Vidal

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

At times, she felt that she was involved in an elaborate peasant dance, which had not been entirely explained to her. Now the hand is held; now the heel is stamped; now the head turns; and then the kiss. ~ Gore Vidal

Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we
the white race
have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. ~ Gore Vidal

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction. ~ Gore Vidal

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

To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round ~ Gore Vidal

I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it. ~ Gore Vidal

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive. ~ Gore Vidal

What is a political party but a conspiracy? ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart. ~ Gore Vidal

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

By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success ~ Gore Vidal

U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans. ~ Gore Vidal

We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things. ~ Gore Vidal

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. ~ Gore Vidal

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. ~ Gore Vidal

We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean. ~ Gore Vidal

Christianity is such a silly religion. ~ Gore Vidal

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest. ~ Gore Vidal

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows. ~ Gore Vidal

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare. ~ Gore Vidal

A crock of shit, Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing. ~ Robert Harris

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon. ~ Gore Vidal

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are. ~ Gore Vidal

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state. ~ Gore Vidal

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking. ~ Gore Vidal

...weaving his verbal wreaths, in prose and verse, of marvellous poison ivy. ~ Gore Vidal

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. ~ Gore Vidal

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own. ~ Gore Vidal

I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers. ~ Gore Vidal