Top 100 Vidal Quotes
#1. Ah, but I'm not a gentleman," said the Marquis. "I have it on the best of authority that I am only a
nobleman."
"Good gracious, Vidal, who in the world dared to say such a thing?" cried his cousin, instantly
diverted.
"Mary," replied his lordship, pouring himself out a glass of wine.
Georgette Heyer
#2. Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
Martin Amis
#3. Vidal Sassoon was the most famous hairstylist in the history of the world.
John Paul DeJoria
#4. Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.
Christopher Bram
#5. 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
#6. I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
#7. Good hairstylists never die. Vidal Sassoon and Paul Mitchell will always live on.
John Paul DeJoria
#8. This is my cousin, by the way. I dare say you know of him. He is very wicked and kills people in duels. Vidal, this is Frederick.' His
Georgette Heyer
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.
John Cusack
#12. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#13. 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
#14. A good trick as you get older is to get a thick pair of glasses that have a dark frame. Everything else can droop and slide but that pair of dark glasses stays sharp and crisp. Look at Cary Grant. Look at Vidal Sassoon.
Tom Ford
#15. Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.
Cybill Shepherd
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I used to read Gore Vidal books and think I was cool.
Matt Smith
#22. 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
#23. Buckley and Vidal were both stand-ins for what was happening on the streets of Chicago and the streets of America. I mean, they're representing these two different camps that are at war in the streets. And they're at war with their words. And each was looking for a knockout.
Morgan Neville
#24. 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
#25. It is possible," said Miss Marling stiffly, "that Frederick and not Mary will have the ordering of the
journey."
Vidal chuckled. "Not if I know my Mary," he replied
Georgette Heyer
#26. I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'
Vidal Sassoon
#27. I got into hairdressing and moved from Dorset to London, where I got an apprenticeship at Vidal Sassoon. This was around '83 or '84. I was working on South Molton Street, which was then the epicenter of all the shops. It was like a catwalk. So I did my apprenticeship there, but I wasn't successful.
Guido Palau
#28. As well as being a creative genius, Vidal Sassoon was a formative figure of the Sixties. Along with the Pill and the mini-skirt, his influence was truly liberating.
Mary Quant
#29. 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
#30. The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
Jerry Kramer
#31. In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.
Michael Caine
#32. The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Gore Vidal
#33. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
Gore Vidal
#34. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Gore Vidal
#35. 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
#36. The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories - gay and straight.
Gore Vidal
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Politically, of course, it's to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.
Gore Vidal
#41. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Gore Vidal
#42. Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Gore Vidal
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. During the late '20s my father left us. My mother was in a complete hole with no money, and we were evicted.
Vidal Sassoon
#46. An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.
Gore Vidal
#47. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
#48. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
Gore Vidal
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal
#52. 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
#53. We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
Gore Vidal
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.
Gore Vidal
#57. Many manage to improve on the first drafts of the lives they are given. But for that they need the courage to jump off a diving board fifty meters high, blindfolded, not knowing if it is water or asphalt that awaits them below.
Alexandre Vidal Porto
#58. That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Gore Vidal
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.
Gore Vidal
#64. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
Gore Vidal
#65. We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
Gore Vidal
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. It's okay saying sorry, but when you are drunk you say what you really feel.
Vidal Sassoon
#70. 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
#71. I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
Gore Vidal
#72. Beauty is.. The passionate and positive expression of the complete self.
Vidal Sassoon
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. ...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
Gore Vidal
#76. It's hard to give advice. There are so many people, how do you give major advice to a group of people, it's very presumptuous.
Vidal Sassoon
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I'm involved with Children's Hospital Los Angeles. I love anything that helps and improves the life of children.
Lisa Vidal
#80. Hair excited me. As the old ways - backcombing, rollers and rigidity - went out of the window, I started to feel the possibilities in front of my eyes.
Vidal Sassoon
#81. 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
#82. Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Gore Vidal
#83. To sculpt a head of hair with scissors is an art form. It's in pursuit of art.
Vidal Sassoon
#84. It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Gore Vidal
#85. As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Gore Vidal
#86. 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
#87. Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
Gore Vidal
#88. I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.
Gore Vidal
#89. 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
#90. The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal
#91. Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
Gore Vidal
#92. 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
#93. Judaism is important to me from a tribal point of view.
Vidal Sassoon
#94. 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
#95. For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
Gore Vidal
#96. In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Gore Vidal
#97. Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
Gore Vidal
#98. 'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
Gore Vidal
#99. The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
Gore Vidal
#100. 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
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