It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Power
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Twentieth Century
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Voting
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Bureaucracy
It makes no difference whom you vote for—the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Voting
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
—Gore Vidal
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Photography
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Charm
Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one’s own cherished beliefs.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Cynicism
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one – and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Authors & Writing
When Ronald Reagan’s career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Presidency
All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything yet, and I think it’s just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share.
—Gore Vidal
There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Men
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.
—Gore Vidal
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Theater
I am, at heart, a tiresome nag complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Advice
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
Topics: Sex
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Wealth, Money
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Theater
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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
Topics: Advertising
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Religion
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: America
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
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Facts
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Friendship, Envy
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Vanity, Appearance
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
Topics: Birds
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Ayn Rand Russian-born American Novelist
- Anita Loos American Actor
- Thornton Wilder American Novelist, Dramatist
- Henry Miller American Novelist
- Reynolds Price American Novelist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Booth Tarkington American Novelist
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