Quotes By Gore Vidal

A good deed never goes unpunished.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

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

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.