Quotes from Gore Vidal

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

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

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Love is not my bag.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.

On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

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

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.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

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.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

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

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.

Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.