Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— 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. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

258. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

265. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

270. “How hungrily we read about ourselves!”

— Gore Vidal

271. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

281. “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

282. “We wear the purple.”

— Gore Vidal

283. “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

284. “I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it’s too discouraging.”

— Gore Vidal

285. “The American vice is explanation.”

— Gore Vidal

286. “I would not be surprised if elephants are more intelligent than human beings. After all, their heads are larger than ours, and the fact that they do not speak might well be an indication of superiority.”

— Gore Vidal

287. “If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.”

— Gore Vidal

288. “I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.”

— Gore Vidal

289. “Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.”

— Gore Vidal

290. “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

291. “All over Greece, strangers of a certain age will greet one another with the question, “And where were you and what did you do when Xerxes came to Marathon?” Then they exchange lies.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

293. “World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.”

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

— Gore Vidal

296. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— 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