Gore Vidal Quotes

There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

I am only at home in the present.

The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.

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

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

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

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

Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.

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

Most of our writers tend to be recorders.

Christianity is such a silly religion.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.

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

I look into my own black heart.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

we no longer live in a nation, but in a Homeland.

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.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.

Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.

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

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

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

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

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

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

I deny that there's such a thing as a gay person. I deny there's such a thing as a heterosexual person.

It is my task always to know, particularly when I don't.

Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.

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

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Like the rest of us, Constantius was many men in the body of one.

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

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

For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself ... one's friends must fail.

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

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

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

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

I liked the trichotomy, that's the only thing I ever liked.

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

As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing
not art, not sex
more than going to the movies.

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you.

Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.

Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.

We've had parallel lives. And frankly, I prefer mine to his. I would not like to be George Bush.

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

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

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

Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.

FBI slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise.

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

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 do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.

I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.

TV news is not very instructive.

I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.

I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.

The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.

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

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography

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.

Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

In actual fact, I have always been a conservative cross, borne sadly by liberal friends.

Americans tend to play different roles, hoping that somehow they'll stumble on the right one.

It is of no consequence what people think of you. What matters is what you think of them.

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

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

The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.

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.

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.

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

He now new a number of people but none well. It was easier to have sex with a man than to acquire a friend.

Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot

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

Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

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.

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

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

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

Realism has always been called cynicism.

Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art.

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

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

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