Quotes from Gore Vidal

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.

I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.