Quotes from Gore Vidal

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.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

To hear two American men congratulating each other on being heterosexual is one of the most chilling experiences - and unique to the United States. You don't hear two Italians sitting around complimenting each other because they actually like to go to bed with women. The American is hysterical about his manhood.

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

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.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

He turned being a Big Loser into a perfect triumph by managing to lose the presidency in a way bigger and more original than anyone else had ever lost it before.

Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

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

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

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

We must declare ourselves, become known allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

For certain people after 50, litigation takes the place of sex.

For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.

Of ex-President Eisenhower at the Republican convention of 1964 Reading a speech with his usual sense of discovery.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.