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
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Democracy
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
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Punishment
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
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: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Audiences, Praise
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
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Vanity, Appearance
Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions…
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Media
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Language
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.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Taxes, Government, Class
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
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
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
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Theater
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Bureaucracy
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
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Democracy
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.
—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
Topics: Speech
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Friendship, Envy
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
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
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Teaching
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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