Gore Vidal Quotes

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

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.

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

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.

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

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.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

Always a godfather, never a god.

There is no such thing as a true account of anything.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

The American vice is explanation.

The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.

I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.

Having no talent is no longer enough.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

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.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.