Gore Vidal Quotes

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Gore Vidal

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 3, 1925

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

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Gore Vidal

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

Gore Vidal

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Gore Vidal

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Gore Vidal

My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.

Gore Vidal

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Gore Vidal

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Gore Vidal

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Gore Vidal

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

Gore Vidal

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Gore Vidal

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.

Gore Vidal

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Gore Vidal

The United States is a madhouse.

Gore Vidal

I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is.

Gore Vidal

I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.

Gore Vidal

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

Gore Vidal

We're not a democracy.

Gore Vidal

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

Gore Vidal

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Gore Vidal