Gore Vidal Quotes

Never have children, only grandchildren.

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

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

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

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

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

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

Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.

Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.

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.

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.

I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.