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

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
- Gore Vidal Quote

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
- Gore Vidal Quote

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
- Gore Vidal Quote

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
- Gore Vidal Quote

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
- Gore Vidal Quote

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
- Gore Vidal Quote

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

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
- Gore Vidal Quote

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
- Gore Vidal Quote

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
- Gore Vidal Quote

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
- Gore Vidal Quote

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

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
- Gore Vidal Quote

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
- Gore Vidal Quote

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
- Gore Vidal Quote

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
- Gore Vidal Quote

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
- Gore Vidal Quote

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
- Gore Vidal Quote

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
- Gore Vidal Quote

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
- Gore Vidal Quote

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
- Gore Vidal Quote

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
- Gore Vidal Quote