Top 603 Quotes & Sayings by Gore Vidal - Page 3

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

The United States is a madhouse.

My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.

I hate nobody.

To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

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

On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.

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

In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.

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

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.

Does one ever read a politician's books?

I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.