Gore Vidal Quotes

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

 

 

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note. ”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

 

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

“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

 

 

 

“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.”
― Gore Vidal, Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings

 

 

“The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“No good deed goes unpunished”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“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

 

 

“Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“[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

 

 

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

 

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Always a godfather, never a god.”
― gore vidal

 

 

“Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an IQ of 60.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

“To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

 

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“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

 

 

 

“a writer must always tell the truth (unless he’s a journalist)”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing–not art, not sex–more than going to the movies. ”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Love is a fan club with only two fans.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

 

 

 

“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“Never offend an enemy in a small way.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

 

 

“If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don’t get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature. ”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

 

“There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.”
― Gore Vidal

 

 

“Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”
― Gore Vidal

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