Gore Vidal Quotes (84 Quotes)

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress you need a religion if you are terrified of death

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

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

I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private moralscontrolling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins ... with whom and how we have sex or gamble.

Miss Georgia and Mr Shaker Heights.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

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.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

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

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.

American writers want to be not good but great and so are neither.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

For half a century photography has been the 'art form' of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due to the designer of the camera To the finger on the button to the law of averages.

Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

The ownership of this country has usually been pretty shrewd. They knew what they wanted. They don't want to pay taxes, certainly. They don't want people blowing them up in the night like 911. And if there ever was great cause for impeachment it would be over 911. Never been a case of negligence like that.

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of