Gore Vidal Quotes

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.

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

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

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

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

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.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

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 entire earth

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

It was of course Jefferson’s gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the “right” answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power.

Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

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

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.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.