Gore Vidal Quotes

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

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

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

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 evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

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.

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

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt - until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

But women are always attracted to power. I do not think there could ever be a conqueror so bloody that most women would not willingly lie with him in the hope of bearing a son who would be every bit as ferocious as the father.

I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

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

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

Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.

If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.

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

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

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

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

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

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

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

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

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don't know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

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

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

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

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever.

I come from the highest class of all. I am a third-generation celebrity.

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

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.