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


Gore Vidal

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Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to othe...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American...
CYBILL SHEPHERD We're on the eve of destruction. Men have lost all sense of honor. Power has become their faith inst...
ATIQ RAHIMI 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 We lived in a classless society. We'd spend a summer at Gore Vidal's house in Italy, but we ...
GABY HOFFMANN Maybe that's what praying is all about. Maybe it's not just asking God to forgive us for bad things ...
SARAH DARER LITTMAN This incident proves how powerful an influx and influence of crime writing from other countries has ...
BARBARA PETERS A key trend over the last two or three years is organized piracy which has become a legitimate busin...
DUNCAN BROWN The attitude of the business community towards investment in Austria and Germany has always been pos...
YELENA BATURINA Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and B...
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL If you guys are upset that Al Gore is endorsing me, attack me, don't attack Al Gore, ... I think Al ...
HOWARD DEAN Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of ...
ROBERT MORGAN Earmarks have become a symbol of a Congress that has broken faith with the people. This earmark ban ...
JOHN BOEHNER I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbo...
JAY PARINI My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have ...
ROMESH GUNESEKERA 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 If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love, and behave ...
MITCH ALBOM Usually a person has more faith in their fear than faith in their future.
DOUG FIREBAUGH Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a ...
THOMAS A. EDISON We're trying to get kids to look at writing and what that creative writer has to do. We want to get ...
FRAN JOHNSON Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
DORIS LESSING It takes faith to make a non existing business to become absolutely essential & valuable.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Both rich and developing countries have not delivered on their promises, and the proposed global net...
PAULO ADARIO Compared to developed countries, or even to some major emerging countries, burdened by aging populat...
MO IBRAHIM Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, an...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The European Union has become a prison of peoples. Each of the 28 countries that constitute it has s...
MARINE LE PEN I have never lost my faith in God.
MAUREEN O'HARA I think it speaks volumes how lost the Democratic Party has become in Texas and how dispirited Democ...
DEAN BARKLEY It is through experience that I have lost faith in USA law enforcement.
STEVEN MAGEE I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
ELIZABETH MOON First of all, we have seen now in six years of Obamacare that it has been a disaster. It is the bigg...
TED CRUZ There has to be a reasonable budget policy that limits the countries in their spending.
KLAUS LIEBSCHER When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be whe...
MARGARET ATWOOD We are dealing with a disease that has devastated the cattle industries in other countries and that ...
BILL BULLARD The world has lost faith in American leadership, and the threats are mounting.
MICHAEL T. FLYNN It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become c...
VLADIMIR PUTIN Business owners should not have to choose between violating their faith and violating the law.
DAVID GREEN Unfortunately, fact checking has become a lost art.
GARY HOPKINS Fiction is [a form of writing which] reveals truths that reality obscures.
JESSAMYN WEST There is a disenchantment with the institutions of elected government. In too many countries, people...
COLIN POWELL 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 Writing has become such an outlet for me that when I don't have it, I just get pent up.
EMM GRYNER Many Muslims put their Islamic faith ahead of their national identity and forbid preachers from othe...
PAT BUCHANAN The battleground has been moderates of all faith traditions in all the countries of the world agains...
FEISAL ABDUL RAUF The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spok...
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER My personality has two sides: a very social side and a reclusive side. I love writing fiction, altho...
JOHN SEARLES The broader issue is there are many U.S. conservative Christians who feel that public schools have b...
CHARLES HAYNES It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.
DANIEL KEYS MORAN No contesten alaridos del monte porque pueden ser del Enrabiado.
FELIPE MONTES People may not have heard of Current TV, but they will have heard that Al Gore has a television stat...
JD LASICA Most rich countries have reported increases in happiness as they become richer.
ADAM DAVIDSON The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themsel...
WALTER LIPPMANN My writing practice taught me the important thing is steadfastness. It's not necessarily discipl...
ELIZABETH GILBERT Faith has won it! Fear has lost it! When you get full of faith, the devil gets filled with fear! Kee...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR To save the lost is to nurture their faith to maturity in the image of Christ
SUNDAY ADELAJA Curran's whore comes to visit us," Jarek said in accented English.

The three men laughed ...
ILONA ANDREWS No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their s...
JOHN P. ZENGER In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush, but still lost the el...
JUAN WILLIAMS In a world with weak aggregate demand, countries are engaging in a futile competition for a greater ...
RAGHURAM RAJAN I have to believe much in God because I have lost my faith in man.
JOSé RIZAL Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been ...
ROALD DAHL I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum...
STUART ROSE A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost...
ANDREW COYNE Writing has become such an outlet for me that when I don't have it, I just get pent up.
EMM GRYNER Have faith in God; God has faith in you.
EDWIN LOUIS COLE The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics
ALBERT SCHWEITZER Search has become that thing that we lost and now we've found again. It's a Prodigal Son.
JONATHAN GAW In the last couple of years, the revenue has become more important, the business has become larger. ...
JOANNE BRADFORD Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
ERIC HOFFER If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have...
SHANNON L. ALDER When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to...
EDWARD HIRSCH Just because you haven't got a home, doesn't make you homeless.
and
Just because you don't...
ANTHONY T. HINCKS I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, ...
ETGAR KERET Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in ...
KATHERINE PATERSON Will Al Gore get the black vote? Yeah. Will Gore have to worry and make sure those voters turn out? ...
DAVID BOSITIS Dullness is more than a religious issue, it is a cultural issue. Our entire culture has become dull....
MIKE YACONELLI Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
ETHAN CANIN Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb...
J. G. BALLARD We certainly havent lost any of the faith we have in the Carnival.
ANDREW FOX Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the year...
T.K. NALIAKA On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal intera...
JAMES SUROWIECKI I have great faith in the future of books - no matter what form they may take - and of science ficti...
CONNIE WILLIS Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fictio...
TANITH LEE Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half...
JOAN DIDION Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each p...
SHANNON L. ALDER Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se...
JOHN UPDIKE But the Western countries that link their partnership with the poorest countries with respect for de...
OMAR BONGO He knows that if he decides to run for president and qualifies that he has to be above his priestly ...
BILL QUIGLEY 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

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