Quotes from Gore Vidal

After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.

The garden was at its best that first week in the month of June. The peonies were more opulent than usual and I walked slowly through the green light on the terrace above the white river, enjoying the heavy odor of peonies and of new roses rambling in hedges.

of all this world's creatures, the author is the vainest

I confess to not having listened to a word of the Declaration of Independence. At the time I barely knew the name of the author of this sublime document. I do remember hearing someone comment that since Mr. Jefferson had seen fit to pledge so eloquently our lives to the cause of independence, he might at least join us in the army. But wise Tom preferred the safety of Virginia and the excitement of local politics to the discomforts and dangers of war.

As I now move, graciously, I hope, towards the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.

Journalism and popular fiction have merged, and the graphic and the plausible have become an end in themselves. The contemporary public plainly prefers mirrors to windows.

As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity it is, or should be, a fair target for satire—both for its own good and for the society's.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one--and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him.

When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you.

helped the boy-governor eat the remains of the fruit, they discussed how it was that newspapers sometimes knew all sorts of secrets that they ought not to have known—and certainly ought not to publish, when the rest of the time they had no interest in facts at all. "Whatever sounds as if it might suit the prejudices of the reader, that is what will be published," said Chase.

But a country which can be saved only by money is a lost country anyway. After all, what is the choice, really? On the one hand: catastrophic capitalism, and on the other a capital catastrophe.

We wear the purple

Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.

I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.

Not only are the male students drawn to violence (at second hand), they are also quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made

the Russian governors are terrified of ideas. If only they knew what our governors know—that in a massive egalitarian society no idea which runs counter to the prevailing superstitions can successfully penetrate the official carapace.

Now-a-days lower Broadway is blocked with traffic at this hour and everyone walks; even the decrepit John Jacob Astor can be seen crawling along the street like some ancient snail, his viscous track the allure of money. Instead

Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television.

Marietta, I do not believe in ghosts, astrology, palmistry, graphology, John Cage, love or God. I do believe in the moment, in the pleasures of the flesh, of conversation, of art-at least for the few so minded. I believe . . .

Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society - that is decadence.

Since they did not understand one another, each was able to sustain an illusion about the other, which was the usual beginning of love, if not truth.

President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.