Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.”

— Gore Vidal

256. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

258. “The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.”

— Gore Vidal

259. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Gore Vidal

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

270. “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

271. “I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.”

— Gore Vidal

272. “This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.”

— Gore Vidal

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

276. “Many years ago, there used to be something called ‘conflict of interest.’ No longer, I’m afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

281. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

283. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

286. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

288. “The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

291. “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

292. “I don’t seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I’m realistic.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

294. “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

295. “We wear the purple.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

297. “It is my task always to know, particularly when I don’t.”

— Gore Vidal

298. “How hungrily we read about ourselves!”

— Gore Vidal

299. “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

300. “I have never been an eavesdropper, even in childhood. Not from any sense of virtue but because I really do not want to know what people think of me or, to be precise, what they say of me – often a different matter. I can usually imagine the unpleasant judgements, for we are what others needs us to be. That is why our reputations change so often and so drastically, reflecting no particular change in us, merely a change in the mood of those who observe us.”

— Gore Vidal