Gore Vidal

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

“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”

“I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.”

“We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.”

“It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.”

“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.”

“There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.”

“You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

“The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.”

“I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.”

“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”

“Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.”

“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”

“I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.”

“Most of our writers tend to be recorders.”

“I am not, at heart, a playwright.”

“In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.”

“With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly onthe original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.”

“presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman.”