Famous Quotes

Quotes by Gore Vidal

• A good deed never goes unpunished.
• Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
• Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
• 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.
• As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
• By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
• Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
• Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
• 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.
• In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
• 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.
• Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
• That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
• 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.
• 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.
• The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
• 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.
• 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.
• Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.