Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.”

— Gore Vidal

354. “But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man’s life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.”

— Gore Vidal

355. “I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that’s just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.”

— Gore Vidal

356. “Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

358. “Since a president can do wrong and since he can be named in debate, he is not an anointed king and so like any man is answerable to the law.” John Marshall then summoned President Jefferson to Richmond.”

— Gore Vidal

359. “Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.”

— Gore Vidal

360. “By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.”

— Gore Vidal

361. “The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, “the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.””

— Gore Vidal

362. “Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”

— Gore Vidal

363. “I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.”

— Gore Vidal

364. “As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity it is, or should be, a fair target for satire – both for its own good and for the society’s.”

— Gore Vidal

365. “It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.”

— Gore Vidal

366. “The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.”

— Gore Vidal

367. “American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work.”

— Gore Vidal

368. “I went to Europe to live in 1961. I’d never have written Julian if it hadn’t been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.”

— Gore Vidal

369. “The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.”

— Gore Vidal

370. “Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.”

— Gore Vidal

371. “The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.”

— Gore Vidal

372. “It was of course Jefferson’s gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the “right” answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power.”

— Gore Vidal

373. “CO? emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.”

— Gore Vidal

374. “They say that to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is fully calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”

— Gore Vidal

375. “I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.”

— Gore Vidal

376. “Journalism and popular fiction have merged, and the graphic and the plausible have become an end in themselves. The contemporary public plainly prefers mirrors to windows.”

— Gore Vidal

377. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.”

— Gore Vidal

378. “Democritus is studying philosophy here at Athens. This means that he delights in quarrels.”

— Gore Vidal

379. “Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.”

— Gore Vidal

380. “Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.”

— Gore Vidal

381. “Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.”

— Gore Vidal

382. “Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.”

— Gore Vidal

383. “What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.”

— Gore Vidal

384. “We’ve had parallel lives. And frankly, I prefer mine to his. I would not like to be George Bush.”

— Gore Vidal

385. “I believe there’s something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I’m all for violence. It’s the only thing Americans understand.”

— Gore Vidal

386. “Seward appreciated the honest and open way that Stanton lied; it was the hallmark of the truly great lawyer, and demonstrated a professional mastery not unlike his own.”

— Gore Vidal

387. “We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.”

— Gore Vidal

388. “The garden was at its best that first week in the month of June. The peonies were more opulent than usual and I walked slowly through the green light on the terrace above the white river, enjoying the heavy odor of peonies and of new roses rambling in hedges.”

— Gore Vidal

389. “I don’t think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.”

— Gore Vidal

390. “Blaise rather liked the way that manners had been pared down to their essentials.”

— Gore Vidal

391. “In other words, if public opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and illegally arrest one’s enemies. Had this letter been published at the time, an excellent case might have been made for the impeachment and removal of a president who had broken that oath he had taken to defend and to protect the Constitution by conspiring to obstruct and pervert the course of justice.”

— Gore Vidal

392. “To want power is corruption already.”

— Gore Vidal

393. “Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader’s Digest, which he studied the way that Jefferson did Montesquieu.”

— Gore Vidal

394. “Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television.”

— Gore Vidal

395. “Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.”

— Gore Vidal

396. “When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn’t agreeing with you. He’s just listening to you.”

— Gore Vidal

397. “All things turn out ill, in the end. But that is the ill nature of things, to end.”

— Gore Vidal

398. “Since they did not understand one another, each was able to sustain an illusion about the other, which was the usual beginning of love, if not truth.”

— Gore Vidal

400. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one – and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”

— Gore Vidal