Quotes By Gore Vidal

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

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.

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.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

We're not a democracy.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

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

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Never have children, only grandchildren.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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