Gore Vidal Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.

Gore Vidal
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
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare had perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about five and Samuel Beckett one — and perhaps a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Gore Vidal
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

Gore Vidal
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Gore Vidal
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.

Gore Vidal
You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives.

Gore Vidal
Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt. One's family.

Gore Vidal
Anybody who's not paranoid is not in full possession of the facts.

Gore Vidal
There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.

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

Gore Vidal
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

Gore Vidal
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

Gore Vidal
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

Gore Vidal
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Gore Vidal
Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.

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

Gore Vidal
Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Gore Vidal
Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.

Gore Vidal
Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

Gore Vidal
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Gore Vidal
We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.

Gore Vidal
Is there another word in the English language quite so useful, so hopeful, so truly pregnant as yet?

Gore Vidal
They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Gore Vidal
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal
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
There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

Gore Vidal
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Gore Vidal
Contrary to vulgar legend the lives of great ballerinas are not entirely given up to a few minutes of graceful movement every night followed by champagne drunk out of their toeshoes till dawn, in the company of financiers... no, most of their time is spent in filthy rehearsal halls, inhaling dust, or else in class, daily, year in year out, practicing, practicing even after they are already prima ballerinas.

Gore Vidal
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Gore Vidal