Gore Vidal

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

I am only at home in the present.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

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.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'

Envy is the central fact of American life.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

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.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.

Democracy is supposed to give you a feeling of choice like painkiller x and painkiller y. But theyre both just aspirin.

In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

Love is not my bag.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?

A good deed never goes unpunished.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

We're not a democracy.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

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.

Does one ever read a politician's books?

It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

The United States is a madhouse.

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

Corporations must pay tax.

It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.

Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.

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.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

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

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.

During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

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.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.

As for civil liberties any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living if not in a police state at least in a police city.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

Its not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.

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.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

He who is last had best laugh.