A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Gore Vidal
3
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Gore Vidal
4
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
Gore Vidal
5
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
Gore Vidal
6
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal
7
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
8
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
9
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Gore Vidal
10
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
Gore Vidal
11
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Gore Vidal
12
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal
13
It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal
14
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
15
Never have children, only grandchildren.
Gore Vidal
16
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
17
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
Gore Vidal
18
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
19
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Gore Vidal
20
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
Gore Vidal
21
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
22
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
Gore Vidal
23
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
24
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
25
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
Gore Vidal
26
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
27
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
28
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
Gore Vidal
29
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
30
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
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
33
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
Gore Vidal
34
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Gore Vidal
