It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
GORE VIDALI was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
-
-
In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.
GORE VIDAL -
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
I am not, at heart, a playwright.
GORE VIDAL -
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
GORE VIDAL -
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
GORE VIDAL -
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
GORE VIDAL -
What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
GORE VIDAL -
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
GORE VIDAL -
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
GORE VIDAL -
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL -
Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
GORE VIDAL -
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
GORE VIDAL -
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
GORE VIDAL -
The United States is a madhouse.
GORE VIDAL -
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
GORE VIDAL -
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
GORE VIDAL -
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL -
The unfed mind devours itself.
GORE VIDAL -
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
GORE VIDAL -
I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
GORE VIDAL -
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
GORE VIDAL -
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.
GORE VIDAL -
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
GORE VIDAL