Quotes By Gore Vidal

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

A good deed never goes unpunished.

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?

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

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

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

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

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.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.