Quotes from Gore Vidal

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.

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

Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

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

It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

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

There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Gossip is conversation about people.