Inspirational Quotes by Gore Vidal (American Novelist)

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

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

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

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

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

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Praise, Audiences

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction

Never have children, only grand children.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children

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

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: Envy, Friendship

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

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

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

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

It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Space

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

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

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

What is a long life but a nightmare of endless repetition?
—Gore Vidal

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

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

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Children

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Teaching

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

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

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Americans

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Twentieth Century

It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.
—Gore Vidal

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: Class, Taxes, Government

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’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Punishment

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

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

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Democracy

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

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Wealth, Money

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

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
Topics: Vanity, Appearance

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, Writers, Authors & Writing

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