After all, as educated men, we should realize that myths always stand for other things. They are toys for children teething. The man knows that the toy horse is not a true horse but merely suggests the idea of a horse to a baby's mind. When we pray before the statue of Zeus, though the statue contains him as everything must, the statue is not the god himself but only a suggestion of him. Surely, as fellow priests, we can be frank with one another about these grown-up matters.


Gore Vidal

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretche...
EMMA LAZARUS
The answer isn't more time but a greater awareness of the time we have.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES
Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect ...
THOMAS HARRIS
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both ever...
CRAIG CLEVENGER
Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough sta...
JOSE MARTI
If we all look at life we think how nice, then we look at death and everybody goes oh you can say th...
GARY F EVANS...
Why is England manufacturing bigger and better airplanes and bombs and at the same time churning out...
ANNE FRANK
She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I love my mom so much. I don't care if that's corny to say. I think on my next birthday, I'm going t...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
We Are All Infinite
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
That one moment when you know you are not a sad story. You are ALIVE.
STEPHAN CHBOSKY
Somos quienes somos por un montón de razones.Quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.Pero aun...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
Ambos dijeron que tomara asiento y parecían hablar en serio, así que me senté.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all beco...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybewe'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
There's nothing like the deep breathes after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore st...
STHEPHEN CHBOSKY
no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks, when the teacher rings the bell, drop...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
the room of the spirit is the mind and the seat of the spirit is the heart. What we give room to muc...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
The fear of God is the only cure for the fear of people.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
If you love someone you must set them free like the wind and give them the respect they deserve.If y...
GARY F EVANS...
Your mind is a Microcosm of strength and power. There’s all the magic you need in it. When all els...
CHINONYE J. CHIDOLUE
A great future starts with what you can see
SOTONYE ANGA
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
We should not blame people by the mistakes of others.
DANIEL MELGAçO
The Dream of a Queer Fellow I write the words again and they appear doubly pregnant with meaning. It...
JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY
I was very grateful to have heard it again. Because I guess we all forget sometimes. And I think eve...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
What will make you a star is in you
SOTONYE ANGA
Mother Superior jump the gun...
-The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
LAUREN MYRACLE
I am often asked how it is that I am able to value people to such a deep degree. Apparently, I exhib...
C. JOYBELL C.
That's really sad," Beth said softly, "To have no one left.
R.J. SCOTT
35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give...
JAMES C. DOBSON
I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO
We begin to fight. The wind and I. Horns locked. Battling each other with elements.
LAURA DOCKRILL
Discreet Cat is a really promising young horse, but after assessing the situation, Sheik Mohammed ha...
SIMON CRISFORD
The disease is no longer a novelty to people, and sometimes owners take it upon themselves to diagno...
DAVID GAINES
Horsemanship through the history of all nations has been considered one of the highest accomplishmen...
WILL ROGERS
I was suddenly very aware of the fact it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my fac...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
The only perspective is to really be there.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I didn't feel like reading that night, so I went downstairs and watched a half-hour long commercial ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
From the Kindle Book Reflections in the Mirror of Life:
“In a slum somewhere in India
As...
THE PROPHET OF LIFE
There are types of people who want to have leverage over other people's lives. For no other reason t...
C. JOYBELL C.
A couple of customers interrupted [...] who wanted to know if we had some YA book about ants and ali...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON
Well, you can't know it without something having been sneezed.
A.A. MILNE
We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”
...
A.A. MILNE
A mentor stops contributing when he is seen as a statue of wisdom who just talks and never involve h...
RITESH AMBASTHA
The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a...
ARUNDHATI ROY
The Ass and the Charger AN ASS congratulated a Horse on being so ungrudgingly and carefully provide...
AESOP
The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
You deserve to be with somebody, who knows you're the one, from that very first moment he lays eyes ...
C. JOYBELL C.
Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an...
LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD
The Horse and His Rider A horse soldier took the utmost pains with his charger. As long as the war ...
AESOP
I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Pete Rose may not make the Hall of Fame, but a statue of him is going to be erected outside the Cinc...
FRANK DEFORD
Don't settle for a normal life. Not when you can enjoy the wonderful weirdness of being who God crea...
CRAIG GROESCHEL
The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a...
JEANETTE CORON
It wouldn't be unfair to say that not only is the horse out of the barn but Finance has no idea wher...
DON DRUMMOND
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.
JOHN DONNE
If we're honest with ourselves, most of us know the one thing we lack.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
The sculptor who deals with form seeks to imprison beauty in a marble statue that will withstand the...
MAX HEINDEL
Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God...
THOMAS MERTON
A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a hor...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON
It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON
When we attribute foreknowledge to God, we mean that all things always were, and perpetually remain,...
JOHN CALVIN
The mark of a real man, is a man who can allow himself to fall deeply in love with a woman. But the ...
C. JOYBELL C.
I just want you to know that you’re very special… and the only reason I’m telling you is that ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window
SUZY DAVIES
If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have...
LEMONY SNICKET
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other i...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other i...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
[It is] a statue that draws children as hot toast does butter.
LINDA CHARLTON
The idea is to believe me... but as far as I see the world... to believe is a sin... to trust me one...
DEYTH BANGER
She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.
DIANA WYNNE JONES
The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN
By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while anothe...
JOSEPH CONRAD
True Christianity consists only in pure faith, love, and an holy life; which holiness of life spring...
JOHANN ARNDT
With the statue and gates with my name, it's all a great thrill. People are now saying ' I'll meet y...
FRED PERRY
In a day and age where it seems like women want to be with unstable, psychotic, manipulative freaks;...
C. JOYBELL C.
...that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't...
C. S. LEWIS
Pregnancy is barbaric. … The husband's guilty waning of sexual desire, the woman's tears in fr...
THE CHILDREN
I beheld the trappings of upper-middle-class comfort. The big-screen TV and VCR. The crush of name-b...
THE CHILDREN
We may not get to choose how we die, but we can chose how we live.
The universe may for...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON
Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long ...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON
We are to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any sh...
MARK HOPKINS
Be nobel. Be the light as if you are the source of life.
DEBASISH MRIDHA

More Gore Vidal

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which ...
GORE VIDAL
McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
GORE VIDAL
I can understand companionship.
GORE VIDAL
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He u...
GORE VIDAL
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Li...
GORE VIDAL
I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
GORE VIDAL
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose p...
GORE VIDAL
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them ...
GORE VIDAL
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a pol...
GORE VIDAL
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No Fi...
GORE VIDAL
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
GORE VIDAL
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some eviden...
GORE VIDAL
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
GORE VIDAL
I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
GORE VIDAL
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to ...
GORE VIDAL
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
GORE VIDAL
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness witho...
GORE VIDAL
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, an...
GORE VIDAL
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness...
GORE VIDAL
Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL
For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures ar...
GORE VIDAL
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is...
GORE VIDAL
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence...
GORE VIDAL
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
GORE VIDAL
It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Fr...
GORE VIDAL
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo -- or heterosex...
GORE VIDAL
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex cer...
GORE VIDAL
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
GORE VIDAL
Never have children, only grand children.
GORE VIDAL
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described,...
GORE VIDAL
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you ...
GORE VIDAL
When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a C...
GORE VIDAL
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time...
GORE VIDAL
There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master...
GORE VIDAL
Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is a...
GORE VIDAL
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No Fi...
GORE VIDAL
For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are...
GORE VIDAL
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...
GORE VIDAL
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
GORE VIDAL
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives ...
GORE VIDAL
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But the...
GORE VIDAL
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues an...
GORE VIDAL
Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning wh...
GORE VIDAL
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imag...
GORE VIDAL
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, ...
GORE VIDAL
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours,...
GORE VIDAL
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
GORE VIDAL
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual live...
GORE VIDAL
Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
GORE VIDAL
Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL
All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which ...
GORE VIDAL
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence t...
GORE VIDAL
It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we...
GORE VIDAL
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
GORE VIDAL
I'm a born-again atheist.
GORE VIDAL
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes i...
GORE VIDAL
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
GORE VIDAL
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL
It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real trag...
GORE VIDAL
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us th...
GORE VIDAL
For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, t...
GORE VIDAL
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a deb...
GORE VIDAL
Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
GORE VIDAL
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust a...
GORE VIDAL
I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for m...
GORE VIDAL
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
GORE VIDAL
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...
GORE VIDAL
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
GORE VIDAL
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...
GORE VIDAL
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Repu...
GORE VIDAL
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not al...
GORE VIDAL
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Re...
GORE VIDAL
It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
GORE VIDAL
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the t...
GORE VIDAL
I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased beha...
GORE VIDAL
Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete w...
GORE VIDAL
Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillf...
GORE VIDAL
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But the...
GORE VIDAL
Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a f...
GORE VIDAL
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
GORE VIDAL
In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he wa...
GORE VIDAL
I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
GORE VIDAL
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
GORE VIDAL
It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four per...
GORE VIDAL
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
GORE VIDAL
No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be...
GORE VIDAL
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
GORE VIDAL
Envy is the central fact of American life.
GORE VIDAL
I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the sc...
GORE VIDAL
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
GORE VIDAL
By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We als...
GORE VIDAL
Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriousl...
GORE VIDAL
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself a...
GORE VIDAL
For certain people after 50, litigation takes the place of sex.
GORE VIDAL
It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.
GORE VIDAL
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
GORE VIDAL
For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL
I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to ...
GORE VIDAL
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for c...
GORE VIDAL
I might be President by now if it weren't for this 'queer' thing
GORE VIDAL
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualifi...
GORE VIDAL
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
GORE VIDAL
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who...
GORE VIDAL
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
GORE VIDAL
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
GORE VIDAL
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we ca...
GORE VIDAL
Never have children, only grandchildren.
GORE VIDAL
It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four p...
GORE VIDAL
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is ...
GORE VIDAL
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand th...
GORE VIDAL
Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL
Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desparately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers...
GORE VIDAL
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
GORE VIDAL
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once...
GORE VIDAL
I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a fe...
GORE VIDAL
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and h...
GORE VIDAL
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested...
GORE VIDAL
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's t...
GORE VIDAL
He (Donald) is thorough and very careful not to take sides when there's insufficient evidence,
GORE VIDAL
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make se...
GORE VIDAL
Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of bein...
GORE VIDAL
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in ...
GORE VIDAL
Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.
GORE VIDAL
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we ca...
GORE VIDAL
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
GORE VIDAL
Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'
GORE VIDAL
On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congres...
GORE VIDAL
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes...
GORE VIDAL
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generatio...
GORE VIDAL
Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West...
GORE VIDAL
The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are livi...
GORE VIDAL
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority mus...
GORE VIDAL
I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
GORE VIDAL
The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
GORE VIDAL
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseu...
GORE VIDAL
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of oth...
GORE VIDAL
I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.
GORE VIDAL
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...
GORE VIDAL
What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexu...
GORE VIDAL
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexua...
GORE VIDAL
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
GORE VIDAL
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writ...
GORE VIDAL
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imag...
GORE VIDAL
Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
GORE VIDAL
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grindin...
GORE VIDAL
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fi...
GORE VIDAL
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
GORE VIDAL
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
GORE VIDAL
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives ...
GORE VIDAL
These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all ga...
GORE VIDAL
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttres...
GORE VIDAL
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
GORE VIDAL
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims."
GORE VIDAL
roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private ...
GORE VIDAL
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults
GORE VIDAL
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author'...
GORE VIDAL
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small Amer...
GORE VIDAL
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...
GORE VIDAL
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself m...
GORE VIDAL
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic ...
GORE VIDAL
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on an...
GORE VIDAL
I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I tu...
GORE VIDAL
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose....
GORE VIDAL
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking tha...
GORE VIDAL
I'm a born-again atheist
GORE VIDAL
We are the United States of Amnesia.
GORE VIDAL
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
GORE VIDAL
It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four per...
GORE VIDAL
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I ...
GORE VIDAL
That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.
GORE VIDAL
For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex
GORE VIDAL
A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich d...
GORE VIDAL
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
GORE VIDAL
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience al...
GORE VIDAL
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religi...
GORE VIDAL
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues wil...
GORE VIDAL
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take ...
GORE VIDAL
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen y...
GORE VIDAL
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perce...
GORE VIDAL
Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
GORE VIDAL
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere bec...
GORE VIDAL
Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
GORE VIDAL
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel do...
GORE VIDAL
Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and...
GORE VIDAL
Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe a...
GORE VIDAL
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel...
GORE VIDAL
The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps for...
GORE VIDAL
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
GORE VIDAL
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upo...
GORE VIDAL
My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees...
GORE VIDAL
...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
GORE VIDAL
The failure of Hellenism has been, largely, a matter of organization. Rome never tried to impose any...
GORE VIDAL