Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.”

— Gore Vidal

53. “Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy.”

— Gore Vidal

54. “It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.”

— Gore Vidal

55. “Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.”

— Gore Vidal

56. “Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”

— Gore Vidal

57. “You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.”

— Gore Vidal

58. “The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they’ve “done” Machu Picchu: “Okay, we’ve done magical realism,” so now we can throw it out.”

— Gore Vidal

59. “I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view.”

— Gore Vidal

60. “Christianity is such a silly religion.”

— Gore Vidal

61. “In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.”

— Gore Vidal

62. “No one reads novels anymore. And I don’t see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.”

— Gore Vidal

63. “Always a godfather, never a god.”

— Gore Vidal

64. “The problem with most Americans is that they don’t like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.”

— Gore Vidal

65. “Astronauts: rotarians in outer space.”

— Gore Vidal

66. “How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been two hundred years at it. It’s superb.”

— Gore Vidal

67. “Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

— Gore Vidal

68. “When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.”

— Gore Vidal

69. “Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.”

— Gore Vidal

70. “Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”

— Gore Vidal

71. “The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.”

— Gore Vidal

72. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.”

— Gore Vidal

73. “Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.”

— Gore Vidal

74. “History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.”

— Gore Vidal

75. “First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.”

— Gore Vidal

76. “You can’t be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.”

— Gore Vidal

77. “The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”

— Gore Vidal

78. “The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography.”

— Gore Vidal

79. “Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.”

— Gore Vidal

80. “Since nothing is free, to each his price.”

— Gore Vidal

81. “Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn’t finished coloring either one of them.”

— Gore Vidal

82. “Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer’s art.”

— Gore Vidal

83. “Never have children, only grandchildren.”

— Gore Vidal

84. “Women are put on earth only to provide men with sons.”

— Gore Vidal

85. “Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.”

— Gore Vidal

86. “It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d’etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.”

— Gore Vidal

87. “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action...”

— Gore Vidal

88. “That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.”

— Gore Vidal

89. “Apparently, ‘conspiracy stuff’ is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.”

— Gore Vidal

90. “For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?”

— Gore Vidal

91. “I’m devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I’m a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system; tones you up.”

— Gore Vidal

92. “Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”

— Gore Vidal

93. “I’m in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.”

— Gore Vidal

94. “I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”

— Gore Vidal

95. “Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.”

— Gore Vidal

96. “Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.”

— Gore Vidal

97. “Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states.”

— Gore Vidal

98. “To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.”

— Gore Vidal

99. “I like Italy. I was always at home there, it’s a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.”

— Gore Vidal

100. “Before the word gay had really been invented, was there’s no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters – based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions – would they make categories. Everybody’s everything.”

— Gore Vidal