Gore Vidal

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

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 speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.

At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?