Top 100 Gore Vidal Quotes
#1. The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Gore Vidal
#2. Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
Gore Vidal
#3. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Gore Vidal
#4. God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.
Gore Vidal
#5. 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.
Gore Vidal
#6. 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.
Gore Vidal
#7. The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal
#8. In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Gore Vidal
#9. That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
Gore Vidal
#10. World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
Gore Vidal
#11. Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.
Gore Vidal
#12. Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
Gore Vidal
#13. I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
Gore Vidal
#14. Next to "I win," "I told you so" are the sweetest words.
Gore Vidal
#15. When the white race broke out of Europe 500 years ago, it did many astounding things all over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions.
Gore Vidal
#16. The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
Gore Vidal
#17. My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.
Gore Vidal
#18. Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
Gore Vidal
#19. The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
Gore Vidal
#20. The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
Gore Vidal
#21. I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.
Gore Vidal
#22. World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
Gore Vidal
#23. I say his version because there is no such thing as a true account of anything. Each sees the world from his own vantage point. Needless to say, a throne is not the best place from which to view anything except the backs of prostrate men.
Gore Vidal
#24. What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
Gore Vidal
#25. I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.
Gore Vidal
#26. Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.
Gore Vidal
#27. Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
Gore Vidal
#28. Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.
Gore Vidal
#29. It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.
Gore Vidal
#30. The family in the West is finished ... its origin was economic, not biological ... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
Gore Vidal
#31. USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
Gore Vidal
#32. Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.
Gore Vidal
#33. I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.
Gore Vidal
#34. In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.
Gore Vidal
#35. Christianity is such a silly religion.
Gore Vidal
#36. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
Gore Vidal
#37. Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
Gore Vidal
#38. The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
Gore Vidal
#39. At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
Gore Vidal
#40. True history," said Hearst, with a smile that was, for once, almost charming, "is the final fiction. I thought even you knew that.
Gore Vidal
#41. The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
Gore Vidal
#42. At times, she felt that she was involved in an elaborate peasant dance, which had not been entirely explained to her. Now the hand is held; now the heel is stamped; now the head turns; and then the kiss.
Gore Vidal
#43. As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
Gore Vidal
#44. 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.
Gore Vidal
#45. A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?
Gore Vidal
#46. There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.
Gore Vidal
#47. Having no talent is no longer enough.
Gore Vidal
#48. I realize," said Sumner, "that the press is hardly reliable." Lincoln turned from the window; suddenly, he grinned. "Oh, yes, they are. They lie. And then they re-lie. So they are nothing if not re-lie-able.
Gore Vidal
#49. If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
Gore Vidal
#50. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
Gore Vidal
#51. You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
#53. There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
#54. I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Gore Vidal
#55. I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction.
Gore Vidal
#56. Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
Gore Vidal
#57. Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
Gore Vidal
#58. 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.
Gore Vidal
#59. Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.
Gore Vidal
#60. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
Gore Vidal
#61. Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal
#62. It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
Gore Vidal
#63. Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.
Gore Vidal
#64. It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Gore Vidal
#65. 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.
Gore Vidal
#66. Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.
Gore Vidal
#67. It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
Gore Vidal
#68. I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.
Gore Vidal
#69. 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.
Gore Vidal
#70. Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
Gore Vidal
#71. Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal
#72. 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.
Gore Vidal
#73. I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.
Gore Vidal
#74. Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
Gore Vidal
#75. If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."
Gore Vidal
#76. On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
Gore Vidal
#77. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
Gore Vidal
#78. There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
Gore Vidal
#79. Eventually all things are known. And few matter.
Gore Vidal
#80. I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
Gore Vidal
#81. Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.
Gore Vidal
#82. I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
Gore Vidal
#84. In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
Gore Vidal
#85. My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
Gore Vidal
#86. What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
Gore Vidal
#87. After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.
Gore Vidal
#88. Love is a fan club with only two fans.
Gore Vidal
#89. While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
Gore Vidal
#90. You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Gore Vidal
#91. I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
Gore Vidal
#92. The Russian governors are terrified of ideas. If only they knew what our governors know - that in a massive egalitarian society no idea which runs counter to the prevailing superstitions can successfully penetrate the official carapace.
Gore Vidal
#93. I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
Gore Vidal
#94. I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view.
Gore Vidal
#95. I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
Gore Vidal
#96. It is my task always to know, particularly when I don't.
Gore Vidal
#97. The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
Gore Vidal
#98. What begins with comedy ends with comedy ... in my short view of the matter.
Gore Vidal
#99. Ronald Reagan is a triumph of the embalmer's art.
Gore Vidal
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