Gore Vidal Quotes (84 Quotes)

Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.

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

As dumb as this administration is, they don't look ahead. They don't know where any countries are. They don't know how to make deals. They don't really know much about anything. There is no plan.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America, painfully brief.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

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

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

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

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

It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create ''one world.'' Instead of one world, we have ''star wars,'' and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

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

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

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.

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

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

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.

Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

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

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

These people Bush Administration are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5. . . . I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

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

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.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

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

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

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

We're not a democracy.