Gore Vidal Quotes

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.

The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.

I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.

The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.

The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.

U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

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

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

I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.

anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

Which other major religion is based on the Godhead incarnate being whipped, tacked to a cross, stabbed? Only the Marquis de Sade could have made up a sicker religion. It's no wonder that those brought up in such a culture hate life and enjoy inflicting pain. All societies are sick but some are sicker than others. Christian societies are certainly the sickest.

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

It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run.

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

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

Many people in the United States happen to believe that United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of western Europe and the other parts of the world.

I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

Politically, of course, it's to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.

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

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.

In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is-yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos.

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.

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.

Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

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

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

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

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt's Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

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

The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything.