Gore Vidal Quotes

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

Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.

Yo, peep. This me name be Gore Vidal. I is spitting rhymes about early history. Why homies give props to Uzis, not books? Ain't nothing but a mystery, aight.

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.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

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

KRETON: War is your specialty. Historians love you for it. I love you for it. After all, not only is it fun, it’s creative! Your best scientific discoveries are made in wartime: the atom bomb, radar, luncheon meat. And think of all that travel! Getting away from home, making new acquaintances, indulging in amatory dalliance with strangers. So broadening. And then: the delirium of battle, the rush of adrenaline to the head as the trumpets sound ATTACK! Conrad, war is the principle art form of your race.

It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus—due process of law—and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere!

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.

In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.

The late Mr. [Carl] Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank ("Ker-oh-seen!" he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine — ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness.