Gore Vidal Quotes

Author Image

Gore Vidal

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 3, 1925

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Gore Vidal

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Gore Vidal

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

Gore Vidal

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Gore Vidal

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Gore Vidal

I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

Gore Vidal

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

I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.

Gore Vidal

Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.

Gore Vidal

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Gore Vidal

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Gore Vidal

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

Gore Vidal

Corporations must pay tax.

Gore Vidal

The media can't get anything straight.

Gore Vidal

I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

Gore Vidal

It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.

Gore Vidal

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

Gore Vidal

I am only at home in the present.

Gore Vidal

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

Gore Vidal

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

Gore Vidal