Vidal's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.

John Cusack

#3. You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.

Gore Vidal

#4. In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.

Gore Vidal

#5. What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world ... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.

Gore Vidal

#6. The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

Gore Vidal

#7. Does one ever read a politician's books?

Gore Vidal

#8. To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.

Gore Vidal

#9. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

Gore Vidal

#10. By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Gore Vidal

#11. "Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

Gore Vidal

#12. You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child ... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.

Gore Vidal

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I liked the trichotomy, that's the only thing I ever liked.

Gore Vidal

#16. Of all this world's creatures, the author is the vainest,

Gore Vidal

#17. Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

Gore Vidal

#18. By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

Gore Vidal

#19. Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'

Gore Vidal

#20. 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

#21. Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

Cybill Shepherd

#22. A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#24. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

Gore Vidal

#25. The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.

Gore Vidal

#26. My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

Gore Vidal

#27. 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.

Gore Vidal

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Aging in Hollywood sucks. There's always so much pressure to look way younger than you are, and everyone's watching! I'd like to embrace getting older, because it's kind of inevitable. The different, wiser me, to be at peace with how I look and I'm supposed to look - it's a work in progress.

Lisa Vidal

#31. I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.

Gore Vidal

#32. 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

#33. To me hair dressing means shape. It's very important that the foundations should be right.

Vidal Sassoon

#34. In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

Gore Vidal

#35. When you want something so badly, you just do it. You don't think about how hard it's going to be.

Lisa Vidal

#36. I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Gore Vidal

#37. I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.

Gore Vidal

#38. From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.

Gore Vidal

#39. One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

Gore Vidal

#40. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what's going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it's trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

Gore Vidal

#41. Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

Gore Vidal

#42. 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

#43. I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

Gore Vidal

#44. Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#46. 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

#47. It was of course Jefferson's gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the "right" answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power.

Gore Vidal

#48. Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Gore Vidal

#49. Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be
at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,
but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.
It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

Gore Vidal

#50. As the late afternoon sun shone in Shaw's face and a soft flower-scented wind cooled him, his unhappiness turned to a detachment that was not at all unpleasant. He was utterly alone in the world. This knowledge thrilled him.

Gore Vidal

#51. There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

Gore Vidal

#52. I'm involved with Children's Hospital Los Angeles. I love anything that helps and improves the life of children.

Lisa Vidal

#53. I get to be creative and touch other people's lives.

Lisa Vidal

#54. That's why Priscus is wisest of all: silence cannot be judged. Silence masks all things or no thing. Only Priscus can tell us what his silence conceals, but since he won't, we suspect him great.

Gore Vidal

#55. 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

#56. If you get hold of a head of hair on somebody you've never seen before, cut beautiful shapes, cut beautiful architectural angles and she walks out looking so different - I think that's masterful.

Vidal Sassoon

#57. 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

#58. So I was shampooing at 14. But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it.

Vidal Sassoon

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

Gore Vidal

#60. 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

#61. As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

#63. To sculpt a head of hair with scissors is an art form. It's in pursuit of art.

Vidal Sassoon

#64. 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

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

Gore Vidal

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

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

Gore Vidal

#70. It's okay saying sorry, but when you are drunk you say what you really feel.

Vidal Sassoon

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

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

Gore Vidal

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

Gore Vidal

#79. Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society ... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Gore Vidal

#80. After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

Gore Vidal

#81. 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

#82. A writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

Gore Vidal

#83. Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Gore Vidal

#84. When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you.

Gore Vidal

#85. It was my mother's idea. Her feeling was that I didn't have the intelligence to pick a trade myself.

Vidal Sassoon

#86. [Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.

Gore Vidal

#87. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#88. Hairdressing in general hasn't been given the kudos it deserves. It's not recognised by enough people as a worthy craft.

Vidal Sassoon

#89. As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity it is, or should be, a fair target for satire - both for its own good and for the society's.

Gore Vidal

#90. Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge ... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

Gore Vidal

#91. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

Gore Vidal

#92. To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.

Gore Vidal

#93. There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

Gore Vidal

#94. 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

#95. Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art.

Gore Vidal

#96. I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

Gore Vidal

#97. 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.

Gore Vidal

#98. In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

Gore Vidal

#99. [ 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.

Gore Vidal

#100. Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.

Gore Vidal