It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
GORE VIDALThere is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
-
-
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
GORE VIDAL -
TV news is not very instructive.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
GORE VIDAL -
Corporations must pay tax.
GORE VIDAL -
Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
GORE VIDAL -
I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
GORE VIDAL -
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL -
By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
GORE VIDAL -
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
GORE VIDAL -
I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
GORE VIDAL -
The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
GORE VIDAL -
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL -
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
GORE VIDAL -
Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
GORE VIDAL -
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
GORE VIDAL -
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
GORE VIDAL -
Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
GORE VIDAL -
What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
GORE VIDAL -
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
GORE VIDAL -
Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
GORE VIDAL -
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
GORE VIDAL -
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
GORE VIDAL -
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
GORE VIDAL