Quotes from Gore Vidal

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

COâ'' emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land.

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

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

Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan's library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn't finished coloring either one of them.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

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.

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.