Best Gore Vidal Quotes

#1. Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#3. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Gore Vidal

#4. We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

Gore Vidal

#5. 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.

Gore Vidal

#6. The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

Gore Vidal

#7. No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Gore Vidal

#8. I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

Gore Vidal

#9. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.

Gore Vidal

#10. 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

#11. ...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

Gore Vidal

#12. Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

Gore Vidal

#13. Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

Gore Vidal

#14. I like Italy. I was always at home there, it's a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.

Gore Vidal

#15. 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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#18. Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.

Gore Vidal

#19. Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the
American political elite from the beginning.

Gore Vidal

#20. Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#22. 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

#23. I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#25. I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.

Gore Vidal

#26. 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.

Gore Vidal

#27. He who is last had best laugh.

Gore Vidal

#28. It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#30. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#32. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we
the white race
have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.

Gore Vidal

#33. The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories - gay and straight.

Gore Vidal

#34. The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Gore Vidal

#35. 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

#36. In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#38. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

Gore Vidal

#39. Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.

Gore Vidal

#40. When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.

Gore Vidal

#41. The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized ...

Gore Vidal

#42. An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#44. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Gore Vidal

#45. I belong to the highest class there is: I'm a third generation celebrity. My grandfather, father, and I have all been on the cover of Time. That's all there is. You can't go any higher in America.

Gore Vidal

#46. 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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#48. 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

#49. We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

Gore Vidal

#50. Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.

Gore Vidal

#51. Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#53. That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Gore Vidal

#54. 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.

Gore Vidal

#55. 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

#56. I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.

Gore Vidal