Gore Vidal Quotes

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

I'm a born - again atheist.

I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible.

What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.

We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.

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

What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.

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

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

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character.

Astronauts: rotarians in outer space.

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

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.

The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. They say, "We were elected by the gods to govern the planet." But the truth is that what counts is getting hold of the last oil reserves. Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the country is going to absolute ruin.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Christianity is such a silly religion.

Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

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.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.

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

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

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.

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.

Since there is no system of public education, the great majority of my fellow citizens is frighteningly ignorant. They have no idea where Iraq is. They accept as the gospel whatever the government tells them. Good grief, any other normal country would have been against the Iraq war! But we live in an abnormal country, governed by experts in deceptive advertising.

I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called 'The Duck and the Kangaroo'. Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to read grown-up books to him, mostly constitutional law and, of course, the Congressional Record. The later continence of my style is a miracle, considering those years of piping the additional remarks of Mr. Borah of Idaho.

The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.

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.

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

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

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.

Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.

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?

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.

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.

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.

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

A good deed never goes unpunished.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.