Gore Vidal Quotes

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!

"All over Greece, strangers of a certain age will greet one another with the question, "And where were you and what did you do when Xerxes came to Marathon?" Then they exchange lies."

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.

As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.

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

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.

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

I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be
at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,
but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.
It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

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.