Quotes from Gore Vidal

There is no need for us to know what we cannot know. There is so much for us to deal with here.

while the Spanish Philippines became our first Asian real estate and the inspiration for close to a century now of disastrous American adventures in that part of the world.

Movies were not there simply to reflect life or tell stories but to exist in their own autonomous way and to look, as it were, back at those who made them and watched them.

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

Nothing man invents can last forever, including Christ, his most mischievous invention.

I'm afraid that I've always been jealous of those I care about, and since they are so very few, one's apt to become ridiculously jealous. Sooner or later, I always blame myself. I always try to forgive. And I think I do. Only Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â The mouth was suddenly compressed to a straight line. "I never forget.

I belong to the highest class there is: I'm a third generation celebrity. My grandfather, father, and I have all been on the cover of Time. That's all there is. You can't go any higher in America.

But like every good American, Truman knew he hated Communism. He also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing. No one seemed quite sure. Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism—imported by comical German immigrants with noses always in books—was an ominous specter, calculated to derange a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care, and other Devil's work still being fiercely resisted a century and a half later.

In this I resemble God at the moment he created the universe with a single fart.

No one ever likes any president's appointments, including those appointed.

The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories—gay and straight.

people in the South who can do the work that the slaves did?" "All the more reason," said Lincoln, reasonably, "to reimburse the slave-owners.

Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into rearming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our—well, cozy unremitting war?

Like my countrymen, I am always thrilled when someone entirely without talent is able to become through strenuous and even pathological publicizing of himself a part of the nation's consciousness and for a season famous because that is our American way.

The fat man smiled. "But do you have the nerve to tell the world about yourself?" Paul sighed and looked at his hands. "No," he said, "I don't." "So what can we do, if we're all too frightened?" "Live with dignity, I suppose. And try to learn to love one another, as they say.

No reason to have any particular enemy, though, who knows, if sufficiently goaded, Russia might again be persuaded to play Great Satan in our somewhat dusty chamber of horrors.

He published his most original book, Patriotic Gore.

The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money—and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse." I suppose, if nothing else, I was

But then almost everyone nowadays had two lives, his own and his life at the movies.

And all because of those crazy preachers in the North who want to free our darkies, who

But then what are memories but shadows of objects gone to dust? Or

sees virtue, freedom in a less perfect union.

These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.

Today's centrifugal forces in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia he anticipated in Patriotic Gore where, through his portraits of various leaders in our Civil War, he shows how people, in order to free themselves of an overcentralized state, are more than willing, and most tragically, to shed patriotic gore.