Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.”

— Gore Vidal

202. “I’m a much worse guest than I am a host, and I’m not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.”

— Gore Vidal

203. “One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.”

— Gore Vidal

204. “There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.”

— Gore Vidal

205. “Who gives a damn about being remembered? That’s really for amateurs.”

— Gore Vidal

206. “All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.”

— Gore Vidal

207. “I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.”

— Gore Vidal

208. “There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

— Gore Vidal

209. “Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.”

— Gore Vidal

210. “In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.”

— Gore Vidal

211. “Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you. – Twitter post, July 29, 2012.”

— Gore Vidal

212. “The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving – Italo Calvino.”

— Gore Vidal

213. “Next to “I win,” “I told you so” are the sweetest words.”

— Gore Vidal

214. “Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, “I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.” We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.”

— Gore Vidal

215. “How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

— Gore Vidal

216. “Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that’s the end of the constitution as a working machine.”

— Gore Vidal

217. “Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.”

— Gore Vidal

218. “I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.”

— Gore Vidal

219. “Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.”

— Gore Vidal

220. “The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.”

— Gore Vidal

221. “Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente.”

— Gore Vidal

222. “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

— Gore Vidal

223. “In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.”

— Gore Vidal

224. “Realism has always been called cynicism.”

— Gore Vidal

225. “People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.”

— Gore Vidal

226. “Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one’s family.”

— Gore Vidal

227. “No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.”

— Gore Vidal

228. “I’m in favor of sexual encounters.”

— Gore Vidal

229. “On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”

— Gore Vidal

230. “I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.”

— Gore Vidal

231. “If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.”

— Gore Vidal

232. “France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.”

— Gore Vidal

233. “These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I’m writing, I don’t politick.”

— Gore Vidal

234. “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

235. “Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.”

— Gore Vidal

236. “I don’t see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.”

— Gore Vidal

237. “Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

— Gore Vidal

238. “The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.”

— Gore Vidal

239. “Soon he would move on.”

— Gore Vidal

240. “Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.”

— Gore Vidal

241. “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

242. “Politically, of course, it’s to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.”

— Gore Vidal

243. “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

244. “I do not admire ‘the people,’ as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival – so highly developed in the individual – goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.”

— Gore Vidal

245. “Let the dust take me when the adventure’s done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.”

— Gore Vidal

246. “In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.”

— Gore Vidal

247. “In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.”

— Gore Vidal

248. “The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.”

— Gore Vidal

249. “Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.”

— Gore Vidal

250. “At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care – if, that is, you’re going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.”

— Gore Vidal