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Quotes by Gore Vidal

A good deed never goes unpunished.
– Gore Vidal
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
– Gore Vidal
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
– Gore Vidal
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
– Gore Vidal
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
– Gore Vidal
As dumb as this administration is, they don't look ahead. They don't know where any countries are. They don't know how to make deals. They don't really know much about anything. There is no plan.
– Gore Vidal
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
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
– Gore Vidal
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
– Gore Vidal
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
– Gore Vidal
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? tso the law of averages?
– Gore Vidal
He will lie even when it is inconvenient: the sign of the true artist.
– Gore Vidal
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
– Gore Vidal
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
– Gore Vidal
I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.
– Gore Vidal
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
– Gore Vidal
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
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
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
– Gore Vidal
It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
– Gore Vidal
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
– 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
Miss Georgia and Mr Shaker Heights.
– Gore Vidal
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
– Gore Vidal
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
– Gore Vidal
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
– Gore Vidal
Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
– Gore Vidal
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
– Gore Vidal
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
– Gore Vidal
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
– Gore Vidal
That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.
– Gore Vidal
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
– Gore Vidal
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
– Gore Vidal
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
– 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
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
– Gore Vidal
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
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
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
– Gore Vidal
These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.
– Gore Vidal
This is not at all bad, except as prose.
– Gore Vidal
Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
– Gore Vidal
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
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
– Gore Vidal
We're not a democracy.
– Gore Vidal
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
– Gore Vidal
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
– Gore Vidal
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
– Gore Vidal
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
– Gore Vidal
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
I'm a born-again atheist.
– Gore Vidal
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
– Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
– 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
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
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
– Gore Vidal
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.
– Gore Vidal
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
– Gore Vidal
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
– Gore Vidal