Top 100 Quotes About Gore Vidal
#1. I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.
Jay Parini
#2. When Gore Vidal was coming up, there were three major channels, and he could count on a big audience when he debated someone like William F. Buckley on TV.
Jay Parini
#3. he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot.
Duncan Wu
#4. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.
John Cusack
#5. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#6. I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house in a village called Atrani. I discovered that Gore Vidal lived right above us in a big house, so I sent him a note.
Jay Parini
#7. Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.
Cybill Shepherd
#8. A crock of shit, Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.
Robert Harris
#9. Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.
Edmund White
#10. There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.
M. Stanton Evans
#11. Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.
Ha-Joon Chang
#12. I used to read Gore Vidal books and think I was cool.
Matt Smith
#14. The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.
William Monahan
#15. I stayed at 'Cosmo' well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large - editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal's memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.
John Searles
#16. Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.
Lance Morrow
#17. The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
Jerry Kramer
#18. The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Gore Vidal
#19. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
Gore Vidal
#20. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Gore Vidal
#21. 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
#22. The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories - gay and straight.
Gore Vidal
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Politically, of course, it's to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.
Gore Vidal
#27. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Gore Vidal
#28. Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Gore Vidal
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.
Gore Vidal
#32. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
#33. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
Gore Vidal
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal
#37. 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
#38. We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
Gore Vidal
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.
Gore Vidal
#42. That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Gore Vidal
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.
Gore Vidal
#48. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
Gore Vidal
#49. We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
Gore Vidal
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
Gore Vidal
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. ...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
Gore Vidal
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Gore Vidal
#61. It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Gore Vidal
#62. As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Gore Vidal
#63. In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
Gore Vidal
#64. Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
Gore Vidal
#65. I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.
Gore Vidal
#66. I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
Gore Vidal
#67. The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal
#68. Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
Gore Vidal
#69. All over Greece, strangers of a certain age will greet one another with the question, "And where were you and what did you do when Xerxes came to Marathon?" Then they exchange lies.
Gore Vidal
#70. You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.
Gore Vidal
#71. For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
Gore Vidal
#72. In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Gore Vidal
#73. Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
Gore Vidal
#74. 'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
Gore Vidal
#75. The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
Gore Vidal
#76. The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
Gore Vidal
#77. Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.
Gore Vidal
#78. I enjoy comedic invention, both high and low, there is almost nothing quite so satisfying as making an audience laugh while removing its insides.
Gore Vidal
#79. The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
Gore Vidal
#80. 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
#81. That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
Gore Vidal
#82. I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
Gore Vidal
#84. All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
Gore Vidal
#85. 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.
Gore Vidal
#86. In politics, as in love, opposites attract, and the misunderstandings that ensue tend to be as bitter and, as in love, as equally terminal.
Gore Vidal
#87. Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
Gore Vidal
#88. [Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.
Gore Vidal
#89. Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
#90. 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.
Gore Vidal
#91. I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
Gore Vidal
#92. When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.
Gore Vidal
#93. I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
Gore Vidal
#94. As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.
Gore Vidal
#95. That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
Gore Vidal
#96. Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
Gore Vidal
#97. Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan's library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn't finished coloring either one of them.
Gore Vidal
#98. 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.
Gore Vidal
#99. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically, "It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.
Gore Vidal
#100. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
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