Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

53. “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

54. “Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

56. “Astronauts: rotarians in outer space.”

— Gore Vidal

57. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “Christianity is such a silly religion.”

— Gore Vidal

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

71. “Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”

— Gore Vidal

72. “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

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

— 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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

76. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

79. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

81. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

82. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

84. “A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.”

— Gore Vidal

85. “What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

89. “Never have children, only grandchildren.”

— Gore Vidal

90. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

93. “A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.”

— Gore Vidal

94. “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

95. “The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.”

— Gore Vidal

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Gore Vidal

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

100. “Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.”

— Gore Vidal