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Gore Vidal
152 quotes
“And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth the doing.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possess very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The size of the population of course has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information, literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education is too bland to hope for much change.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament: each participant confident the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish…the theater is a child’s world).”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“KRETON: Well, you know how one feels about history, the glamour of the past; I expected to hear everybody talking about great events—battles, poets, that kind of thing—but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“ELLEN: Of course I know you’re from another planet and all and I guess we do think an awful lot about sex, but we’re not supposed to talk about it and we only do it when nobody’s looking. KRETON: How ravishing! These primitive taboos. You revel in public slaughter: you pay to watch two men hit one another repeatedly, yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse…too delicious!”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“POWERS: Well, good morning Mr. Kreton, and how are we today? KRETON: Absolutely wallowing in the twentieth century.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“KRETON: My dear, you must marry him too. I’m sure the three of you would make a lovely couple.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“ELLEN: Conrad’s a pacifist and willing to fight for it.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“CONRAD: (Patiently) I admit sometimes we get overexcited, but nobody wants a war, because nobody wants to be killed. KRETON: Well, every game has its penalties. I must say I would never have dreamed that one day I should be trying to convince a lower primate that he should behave like a lower primate.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“KRETON: War is your specialty. Historians love you for it. I love you for it. After all, not only is it fun, it’s creative! Your best scientific discoveries are made in wartime: the atom bomb, radar, luncheon meat. And think of all that travel! Getting away from home, making new acquaintances, indulging in amatory dalliance with strangers. So broadening. And then: the delirium of battle, the rush of adrenaline to the head as the trumpets sound ATTACK! Conrad, war is the principle art form of your race.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“DELTON 4: He is morally retarded and, like a child, he regards this world as his plaything.…”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)
“It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: French Letters: The Theory of the New Novel," Encounter magazine (December 1967)
“One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1970)
“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, London (16 September 1973).
“I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: TV interview with David Frost and quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine 16 September 1973
“Envy is the central fact of American life.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gore Vidal," interview by Gerald Clarke (1974), The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 5th series (1981)
“First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gore Vidal," interview by Gerald Clarke (1974), The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 5th series (1981)
“The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The State of the Union", Esquire magazine, (May 1975)
“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Gerard Irvine, "Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg," [memorial service for Driberg] (8 December 1976)
“I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.”
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in profile by Martin Amis, "Mr. Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore" (1977) in The Moronic Inferno (1987)