Quotes By Gore Vidal

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

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.

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.

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

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.