Quotes By Gore Vidal

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

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

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.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

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

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

A good deed never goes unpunished.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

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

We're not a democracy.

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

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