Gore Vidal

The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

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.

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.

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

The constitution has broken down. We have no enemies except the ones we select and direct towards the nearest nuclear bombs. They need an enemy to provoke, a diversion. This is the mentality of tenth-rate people who are in politics because corporate America likes them. They are malleable. They give them contracts to build missile shields that will never work. It's deeply corrupt.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

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

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

I am only at home in the present.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

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

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.