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
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Punishment
Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Style
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Bureaucracy
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Pleasure
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
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Vanity, Appearance
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Theater
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Teaching
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Audiences, Praise
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
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
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
What is a long life but a nightmare of endless repetition?
—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
Topics: Media
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Envy, Friendship
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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
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
Never have children, only grand children.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children
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
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children
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
Major Barkinson had a sure method of foretelling weather, or anything else for that matter. He would, for instance, select a certain patch of sky and then count slowly to three; if, during that time, no sea gull crossed the patch of sky, the thing he wanted would come true
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Weather
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Wealth, Money
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
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Criticism
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Twentieth Century
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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