Gore Vidal Quotes

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

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.

On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.

We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.

Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.

The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.

We are all so simple at heart that become unfathomable to one another.

His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.

Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition.

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

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