Quotes By Gore Vidal

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

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

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.

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

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

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

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

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.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

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

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

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.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

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

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

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

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

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

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

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.