Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

305. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

320. “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

321. “Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.”

— Gore Vidal

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

331. “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

332. “Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him.”

— Gore Vidal

333. “Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.”

— Gore Vidal

334. “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

335. “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

336. “You can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.”

— Gore Vidal

337. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

342. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

345. “Populists have never had a good press in Freedom’s land.”

— Gore Vidal

346. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

349. “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

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

— Gore Vidal