Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Gore Vidal

304. “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

305. “Now-a-days lower Broadway is blocked with traffic at this hour and everyone walks; even the decrepit John Jacob Astor can be seen crawling along the street like some ancient snail, his viscous track the allure of money. Instead.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

311. “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

312. “I deny that there’s such a thing as a gay person. I deny there’s such a thing as a heterosexual person.”

— Gore Vidal

313. “All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.”

— Gore Vidal

314. “I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I’d be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

316. “The American vice is explanation.”

— Gore Vidal

317. “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

318. “Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we’re less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.”

— Gore Vidal

319. “We’re supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don’t practice this glorious act.”

— Gore Vidal

320. “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

321. “You know what Mr. Bates called me?” Seward shook his head with wonder. “An unprincipled liar. And here I am one of the most heavily principled men in politics.” Lincoln chuckled. In every way, making allowances for regional differences, Seward’s humor was not unlike his own. “And since you’re a smart man, Governor, you never actually lie. Smart men never have to.”

— Gore Vidal

322. “If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.”

— Gore Vidal

323. “I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.”

— Gore Vidal

324. “The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.”

— Gore Vidal

325. “Why is it so important to continue after death? We never question the demonstrable fact that before birth we did not exist, so why should we fear becoming once more what we were to begin with?”

— Gore Vidal

326. “Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.”

— Gore Vidal

327. “Most writers write books that they wouldn’t read. I ought to know; I’ve done it myself.”

— Gore Vidal

328. “Contrary to accepted legend, the Philadelphians did not at all mind the presence of the British army in their city; in fact, many of them hoped that Washington would soon be caught and hanged, putting an end to those disruptions and discomforts which had been set in motion by the ambitions of a number of greedy and vain lawyers shrewdly able to use as cover for their private designs Jefferson’s high-minded platitudes and cloudy political theorizings. Shortly.”

— Gore Vidal

329. “The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.”

— Gore Vidal

330. “From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there’s a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.”

— Gore Vidal

331. “Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called – or whatever it is they do.”

— Gore Vidal

332. “Obviously I’m in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.”

— Gore Vidal

333. “Do not regulate the private lives of people because, if you do, they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.”

— Gore Vidal

334. “I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.”

— Gore Vidal

335. “There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.”

— Gore Vidal

336. “The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.”

— Gore Vidal

337. “To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.”

— Gore Vidal

338. “What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?”

— Gore Vidal

339. “In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.”

— Gore Vidal

340. “Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.”

— Gore Vidal

341. “I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.”

— Gore Vidal

342. “As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.”

— Gore Vidal

343. “Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

— Gore Vidal

344. “I’d still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.”

— Gore Vidal

345. “That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.”

— Gore Vidal

346. “I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”

— Gore Vidal

347. “It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.”

— Gore Vidal

348. “None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.”

— Gore Vidal

349. “I said, well, it’s a very primitive country, the United States, and it’s full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.”

— Gore Vidal

Featured in: Country Quotes

350. “What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.”

— Gore Vidal