Gore Vidal

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

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.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.