Top 603 Quotes & Sayings by Gore Vidal - Page 2

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.

I can understand companionship.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

TV news is not very instructive.

Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

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.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.

I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

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.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

What I like least about myself is my belligerence.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

We're not a democracy.

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.

McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'

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

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

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

Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

I am only at home in the present.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Corporations must pay tax.

I'm always an optimist!