Quotes by Gore Vidal

About Gore Vidal:

Gore Vidal was an American writer (of novels, essays, screenplays, and stage plays) and a public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. As Eugene Louis Vidal, he was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–21 and 1931–37). As Gore Vidal, he was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York State, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

Author Bio

  • NameGore Vidal
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornOctober 3, 1925
  • DiedJuly 31, 2012
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Actor; Screenwriter; Novelist; Essayist; Writer
  • AwardsNational Book Award