Gore Vidal

“In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death”

“Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.”

“To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round”

“Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before.”

“A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.”

“I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: “Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing.” The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time’s mystery and a man’s love of life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”

“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.”

“Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

“By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.”

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

“Love is not my bag.”

“Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.”

“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”

“Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.”

“We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.”

“The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.”

“Americans tend to play different roles, hoping that somehow they’ll stumble on the right one.”

“Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.”

“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.”

“Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made”

“[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.”

“Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.”

“How hungrily we read about ourselves!”

“It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.”

“Since nothing is free, to each his price.”

“No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves.”

“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.”

“As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.”

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

“…the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.”

“Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot”

“For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.”

“What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

“Never offend an enemy in a small way.”

“Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”

“Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.”

“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”

“Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth”

“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”

“anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]”

“I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.”

“Love is a fan club with only two fans.”

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