Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society – that is decadence.”

— Gore Vidal

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.”

— Gore Vidal

255. “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

256. “Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you’ve been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.”

— Gore Vidal

257. “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

258. “In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.”

— Gore Vidal

259. “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

260. “You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

— Gore Vidal

261. “After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.”

— Gore Vidal

262. “Come to me and show me a small cancer and I’ll tell you you’ve got a small cancer that should be cut out. That’s realism but in America it’s called cynicism.”

— Gore Vidal

263. “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

264. “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

265. “There is no such thing as a true account of anything.”

— Gore Vidal

266. “Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.”

— Gore Vidal

267. “Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied – as would anybody in his position.”

— Gore Vidal

268. “As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.”

— Gore Vidal

269. “I believe it’s my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.”

— Gore Vidal

270. “You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: ‘Where are the readers?’”

— Gore Vidal

271. “I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.”

— Gore Vidal

272. “If you’re a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.”

— Gore Vidal

273. “Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people’s lives, it’s a great subject.”

— Gore Vidal

274. “To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”

— Gore Vidal

275. “People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It’s generally wrong. Or oversimplified – which is sometimes useful.”

— Gore Vidal

276. “As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.”

— Gore Vidal

277. “I don’t deny or affirm anything. I’m not very personal.”

— Gore Vidal

278. “Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.”

— Gore Vidal

279. “I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.”

— Gore Vidal

280. “Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.”

— Gore Vidal

281. “We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean.”

— Gore Vidal

282. “Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.”

— Gore Vidal

283. “To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved.”

— Gore Vidal

284. “I come from the highest class of all. I am a third-generation celebrity.”

— Gore Vidal

285. “We wear the purple.”

— Gore Vidal

286. “It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.”

— Gore Vidal

287. “Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.”

— Gore Vidal

288. “I’m in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.”

— Gore Vidal

289. “Since the individual’s desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.”

— Gore Vidal

290. “I realize,” said Sumner, “that the press is hardly reliable.” Lincoln turned from the window; suddenly, he grinned. “Oh, yes, they are. They lie. And then they re-lie. So they are nothing if not re-lie-able.”

— Gore Vidal

291. “I liked the trichotomy, that’s the only thing I ever liked.”

— Gore Vidal

292. “I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.”

— Gore Vidal

293. “How hungrily we read about ourselves!”

— Gore Vidal

294. “I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that’s how one starts. Or I started.”

— Gore Vidal

295. “When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.”

— Gore Vidal

296. “All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.”

— Gore Vidal

297. “The tragedy of the United States, thus far in this century, is not the crack-up of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

— Gore Vidal

298. “Do nothing that is not natural – and ritual is natural – and all will be for the best.”

— Gore Vidal

299. “If you’re not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.”

— Gore Vidal

300. “After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did.”

— Gore Vidal