Quotes from Gore Vidal

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be.

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.

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.

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

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.