Quotes by "Gore Vidal"

The unfed mind devours itself.

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

It is infinitely harder to ask questions in such a way that the audience is led not to the answers (the province of the demagogue) but to new perceptions.

Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

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.

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.

Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind. I suppose this is news to those who believe in the two teams: straight, which is good and unalterable; queer, which is bad and unalterable unless it proves to be only a Preference, which must then, somehow, be reversed, if necessary by force.

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

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

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

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.