Gore Vidal Quotes

Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

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.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

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

Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.

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

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

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

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

I look into my own black heart.

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.

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

I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.

I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.

I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.

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.

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

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

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.

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.

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.

Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.

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

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 think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.

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.

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

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

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.