Top 603 Quotes & Sayings by Gore Vidal
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Gore Vidal.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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.
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
The media can't get anything straight.
Never have children, only grandchildren.
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.
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 practices.
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
Love is not my bag.
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
The unfed mind devours itself.
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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.
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?
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.
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
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.
Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.
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.
Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.
When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Gossip is conversation about people.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
He who is last had best laugh.
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
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.
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
Friends, there is no Left in American politics.
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.
I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is.
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