Quotes from Gore Vidal

Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

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

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

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.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!