Gore Vidal Quotes

Love is a fan club with only two fans.

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

It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

Christianity is such a silly religion.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

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.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

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

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

What is a political party but a conspiracy?

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

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

I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.

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

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single...

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Astronauts: rotarians in outer space.

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

USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

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

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

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.

There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."

If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.

Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.

The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.