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

Gore Vidal

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

Gore Vidal

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, ...

Gore Vidal

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Gore Vidal

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not o...

Gore Vidal

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a repu...

Gore Vidal

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

Gore Vidal

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

Gore Vidal

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

Gore Vidal

It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

Gore Vidal

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Gore Vidal

Christianity is such a silly religion.

Gore Vidal

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

Gore Vidal

Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the ent...

Gore Vidal

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-rang...

Gore Vidal

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

Gore Vidal

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Gore Vidal

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.

Gore Vidal

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in hi...

Gore Vidal

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

Gore Vidal

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

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