Gore Vidal Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

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
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Gore Vidal
Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.

Gore Vidal
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

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

Gore Vidal
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.

Gore Vidal
... for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own.

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

Gore Vidal
Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal
The only thing pornography has been known to cause is solitary masturbation; as for corruption, the only immediate victim is English prose.

Gore Vidal
In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.

Gore Vidal
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

Gore Vidal
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
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Gore Vidal
You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Gore Vidal
The last best hope on earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie "answers" questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

Gore Vidal
We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

Gore Vidal
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.

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
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
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
Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?

Gore Vidal
Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

Gore Vidal
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practises.

Gore Vidal
In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously.

Gore Vidal
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
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

Gore Vidal
One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.

Gore Vidal
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

Gore Vidal
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Gore Vidal