1. “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” – Gore Vidal
2. “I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.” – Gore Vidal
3. “One’s neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.” – Gore Vidal
4. “She was intelligent but not clever; drawn” – Gore Vidal
5. “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” – Gore Vidal
6. “Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.” – Gore Vidal
7. “Love is a fan club with only two fans.” – Gore Vidal
8. “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” – Gore Vidal
9. “I’m a born – again atheist.” – Gore Vidal
10. “Having no talent is no longer enough.” – Gore Vidal
11. “The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.” – Gore Vidal
12. “The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself.” – Gore Vidal
13. “There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.” – Gore Vidal
14. “Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one’s family.” – Gore Vidal
15. “A writer must always tell the truth, unless he is a journalist.” – Gore Vidal
16. “I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.” – Gore Vidal
17. “It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.” – Gore Vidal
18. “Let the dust take me when the adventure’s done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.” – Gore Vidal
19. “For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.” – Gore Vidal
20. “As the great questions were always posed in the same way, they invited answers that were equally predictable and unchanging.” – Gore Vidal
21. “Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before.” – Gore Vidal
22. “Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.” – Gore Vidal
23. “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.” – Gore Vidal
24. “I’m a much worse guest than I am a host, and I’m not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.” – Gore Vidal
25. “There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.” – Gore Vidal
26. “Realism has always been called cynicism.” – Gore Vidal
27. “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” – Gore Vidal
28. “To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved” – Gore Vidal
29. “Reality is something the human race doesn’t handle very well.” – Gore Vidal
30. “When a friend succeeds a little something inside me dies.” – Gore Vidal
31. “Never have children, only grandchildren.” – Gore Vidal
32. “These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I’m writing, I don’t politick.” – Gore Vidal
33. “At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.” – Gore Vidal
34. “In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.” – Gore Vidal
35. “True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don’t know quite as well as you know what you do know.” – Gore Vidal
36. “I think it was that season that someone asked me to define “commercialism” and I said that it is the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all.” – Gore Vidal
37. “And all because of those crazy preachers in the North who want to free our darkies, who” – Gore Vidal
38. “But then what are memories but shadows of objects gone to dust? Or” – Gore Vidal
39. “Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.” – Gore Vidal
40. “To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.” – Gore Vidal
41. “My memory plays me odd tricks these days […] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.” – Gore Vidal
42. “The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.” – Gore Vidal
43. “He became the permanent scourge of what he called the “slaveocracy.” – Gore Vidal
44. “I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.” – Gore Vidal
45. “That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.” – Gore Vidal
46. “American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.” – Gore Vidal
47. “It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.” – Gore Vidal
48. “He was, as soldier and man, all of a piece,” – Gore Vidal
49. “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” – Gore Vidal
50. “No man ever knows when he is happy; he can only know when he was happy.” – Gore Vidal
51. “Do not regulate the private lives of people because, if you do, they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.” – Gore Vidal
52. “How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.” – Gore Vidal
53. “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.” – Gore Vidal
54. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” – Gore Vidal
55. “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” – Gore Vidal
56. “Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.” – Gore Vidal
57. “Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, “I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.” We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.” – Gore Vidal
58. “He published his most original book, Patriotic Gore.” – Gore Vidal
59. “…is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?” – Gore Vidal
60. “Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.” – Gore Vidal
61. “Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either. ” – Gore Vidal
62. “The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.” – Gore Vidal
63. “Never offend an enemy in a small way.” – Gore Vidal
64. “Always a godfather, never a god.” – Gore Vidal
65. “The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.” – Gore Vidal
66. “It is my task always to know, particularly when I don’t.” – Gore Vidal
67. “Who gives a damn about being remembered? That’s really for amateurs.” – Gore Vidal
68. “I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That’s my substitute for television.” – Gore Vidal
69. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” – Gore Vidal
70. “I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place” – Gore Vidal
71. “Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s is the wrong one.” – Gore Vidal
72. “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” – Gore Vidal
73. “I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.” – Gore Vidal
74. “No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves.” – Gore Vidal
75. “When anyone says to me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ I say, ‘Why should I, if you can’t?’” – Gore Vidal
76. “Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.” – Gore Vidal
77. “Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.” – Gore Vidal
78. “None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular.” – Gore Vidal
79. “There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.” – Gore Vidal
80. “All over Greece, strangers of a certain age will greet one another with the question, “And where were you and what did you do when Xerxes came to Marathon?” Then they exchange lies.” – Gore Vidal
81. “Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that’s the end of the constitution as a working machine.” – Gore Vidal
82. “The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.” – Gore Vidal
83. “God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.” – Gore Vidal
84. “No one reads novels anymore. And I don’t see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.” – Gore Vidal
85. “I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.” – Gore Vidal
86. “Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society – that is decadence.” – Gore Vidal
87. “To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.” – Gore Vidal
88. “There is no need for us to know what we cannot know. There is so much for us to deal with here.” – Gore Vidal
89. “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.” – Gore Vidal
90. “Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.” – Gore Vidal
91. “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” – Gore Vidal
92. “I’m not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.” – Gore Vidal
93. “Like the rest of us, Constantius was many men in the body of one.” – Gore Vidal
94. “You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.” – Gore Vidal
95. “A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.” – Gore Vidal
96. “For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.” – Gore Vidal
97. “Next to “I win,” “I told you so” are the sweetest words.” – Gore Vidal
98. “The unfed mind devours itself” – Gore Vidal
99. “In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death.” – Gore Vidal
100. “On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.” – Gore Vidal
101. “The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.” – Gore Vidal
102. “…weaving his verbal wreaths, in prose and verse, of marvellous poison ivy.” – Gore Vidal
103. “I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.” – Gore Vidal
104. “Since they did not understand one another, each was able to sustain an illusion about the other, which was the usual beginning of love, if not truth.” – Gore Vidal
105. “Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.” – Gore Vidal
106. “Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.” – Gore Vidal
107. “Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.” – Gore Vidal
108. “We are toys, and a divine child takes us up and puts us down, and breaks us when he chooses.” – Gore Vidal
109. “I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.” – Gore Vidal
110. “In this I resemble God at the moment he created the universe with a single fart.” – Gore Vidal
111. “The worst thing to happen to Lincoln – aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford’s theatre – was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” – Gore Vidal
112. “You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque.” – Gore Vidal
113. “Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever.” – Gore Vidal
114. “We are in danger of government by professional office-holders …” – Gore Vidal
115. “Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us.” – Gore Vidal
116. “Soon he would move on.” – Gore Vidal
117. “A good deed never goes unpunished.” – Gore Vidal
118. “Nothing man invents can last forever, including Christ, his most mischievous invention.” – Gore Vidal
119. “I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past ought to have been it was.” – Gore Vidal
120. “I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.” – Gore Vidal
121. “Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.” – Gore Vidal
122. “I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.” – Gore Vidal
123. “All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.” – Gore Vidal