Top 200 Quotes by Gore Vidal

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

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

The media can't get anything straight.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

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.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.