Top 603 Quotes & Sayings by Gore Vidal - Page 10

Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.

To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.

I deny that there's such a thing as a gay person. I deny there's such a thing as a heterosexual person.

I was born a writer. When that happens, you have no choice in the matter.

We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. They say, "We were elected by the gods to govern the planet." But the truth is that what counts is getting hold of the last oil reserves. Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the country is going to absolute ruin.

Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.

The Americans only like things they can label, even if it kills them. Think of those poor Latin American writers. Some of them are very good. But the "magical realism" label has absolutely ruined them. The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

We've had parallel lives. And frankly, I prefer mine to his. I would not like to be George Bush.

The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.

These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.

The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.

I come from the highest class of all. I am a third-generation celebrity.

In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.

I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.

Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.

I would be literally patrician in the sense that the senators in ancient Rome were called conscript fathers, paters, from which comes the word patrician. So if you come from a senatorial family, you are literally patrician in that sense, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't be Billy Carter, you know, of recent memory.

Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.

These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.

I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible.

Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.

Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.

Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.

Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.

A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.

Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.

Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.

What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.

Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.

The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.

I think we're going to have to accept the fact the U.S. is off the world map. We are not a great player any longer. And when we come home - as we will have to do because we've run out of money - we will discover that Argentine debts means Argentine politics. And on that note, you can wake up in the middle of the night.

I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.

I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.

Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.

Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.

Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.