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


Gore Vidal

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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel...
GORE VIDAL
Scraping the bottom of the barrel
PROVERB
Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American...
CYBILL SHEPHERD
Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to othe...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG
People who pretend to be your friend lead you up a garden path by saying everything that you want to...
GARY F EVANS...
I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
LEONARD COHEN
Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
SOTONYE ANGA
Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and...
GORE VIDAL
'Empire of Self' is a loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini, himself a gifted ...
JEROME CHARYN
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The fear of God is the only cure for the fear of people.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD
You Have Seen the Cure for Cancer Many Times, Even Right Now! So the Problem is Not Finding a Cure, ...
THEHEALTHFOODGURU
Nicolas Cage is the best for taking the role of character Joker. He is pretty damn good at jokes!
DEYTH BANGER
Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and B...
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL
You think if you win the Olympics, you'll become a millionaire overnight. But I was still scrapi...
BRADLEY WIGGINS
We lived in a classless society. We'd spend a summer at Gore Vidal's house in Italy, but we ...
GABY HOFFMANN
From the Kindle Book Reflections in the Mirror of Life:
“In a slum somewhere in India
As...
THE PROPHET OF LIFE
I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house i...
JAY PARINI
I haven't been approached to do a 'Doctor Who' movie. I think they would be scraping the...
COLIN BAKER
More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
BRIAN ENO
(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON
Think of what you see now in public corruption: kickbacks and wire fraud. This is a joke, except for...
CHARLES SCIARRA
Mindfulness is not chasing the moment but beautifying the moment.
AMIT RAY
The secret of life is not in the Die And Live,
The secret of life is Don't ever lose your sense...
SUSHIL SINGH
Time is so important.'so spend time doing something that you love.' make the most of it and Let the ...
NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO
Relations with many of our oldest friends are, quite frankly, scraping the bottom right now,
JOSEPH BIDEN
People may not have heard of Current TV, but they will have heard that Al Gore has a television stat...
JD LASICA
A great future starts with what you can see
SOTONYE ANGA
May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
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
Its a funny thing, I noticed that when people are joking theyre usually dead serious, and when theyr...
JIM MORRISON
The Olympics are one of the top television events.
BRAD ADGATE
With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of...
NICK CAVE
Here is one fact 1 minute to finish the class, 1 day to die, one day behind that fact, one day in th...
DEYTH BANGER
The things i know now, i never knew then. I wish i knew.
SOTONYE ANGA
I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbo...
JAY PARINI
Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies t...
RUPERT MURDOCH
Decisions are the endless uncertainties of life that we'll not know if theyre right until the very e...
LILY COLLINS
I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON
It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON
He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist. It's because some people are naïve enough to co...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyon...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
We were so hungry for 'Sex and the City' that even though it was heightened and written by g...
BETH LITTLEFORD
If you guys are upset that Al Gore is endorsing me, attack me, don't attack Al Gore, ... I think Al ...
HOWARD DEAN
No outside contractor would've done that job [the way we did], because we spent so much time scrapin...
HARRY SCHMIDT
theyre missing whole streets.
SAM WRIGHT
You can miss an experience by obsessing over how to contain it.
GINA GREENLEE
The secret of my success is my hairspray.
RICHARD GERE
Love is blind, and a deaf-mute too.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.
FROM THE TELEVISION SHOW THE WONDER YEARS
It's not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a televi...
JIM BAKKER
The chance to do it over again is called now.
J.R. RIM
The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a...
ARUNDHATI ROY
Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly.
GINA GREENLEE
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
What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO
To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS...
They are definitely hungry to get back in the studio to make another record. They've got a lot of ma...
DAVID HOLMES
This is as good or better than any feature script that I've read in the past few years. I think ther...
BRETT RATNER
Look, my friends!' he called. 'Here's a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven princeling in! If it wer...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
He is a hungry fighter and still the best fighter at his weight. He is hungry now to continue to pro...
HENRY FOSTER
I was at the University of Miami, and I still had, like, a semester or so left. And through the film...
JASON SILVA
There has been a rising floor underneath oil prices, ... Last year we were worried about $40 a barre...
JAN STUART
The challenge to a person having an open mind is that the foolish people see his brain as an open to...
ANUJ SOMANY
Now that would be way too much for the top of a cake.
ANNE BYRN
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
My job was to find interesting material that would give us a quality television show.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD
Eat for lunch, but let something for dinner.
ERBLIN VUKAJ
Jesus Christ wants to show His love for this world through us, Christians.
SUNDAY ADELAJA
If you are among the good fellows chances are that you will be among the blemishes for the wicked ar...
APURVA GAGLANI
It's hard when you have things but lose them, it's even harder when you feel that you're being left ...
GARY F EVANS...
Starting today, must forget what gone yesterday,appreciate what remains today & look forward what ca...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
call it chicken salad
SARAH DESSEN
Society. The same society, I might add, that dictates that little girls should always be sugar and s...
SARAH DESSEN
Right now, everything is going wrong for me - if I fell in a barrel of boobs, I'd come out sucking m...
IAN HOLLOWAY
It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II

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...
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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...
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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
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
But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more s...
GORE VIDAL