Quotes from Gore Vidal

Never have children, only grandchildren.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.

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.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

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

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.

If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.