Gore Vidal
I look into my own black heart.Collection: Heart
Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.Collection: Memories
You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.Collection: Children
To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.Collection: Evil
"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.Collection: War
I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.Collection: Men
Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.Collection: Book
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.Collection: Years
In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is-yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos.Collection: Sky
Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.Collection: Communication
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."Collection: United States
We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.Collection: Average
Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.Collection: Grandma
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.Collection: Ice
What is a political party but a conspiracy?Collection: Party
I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called 'The Duck and the Kangaroo'. Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to read grown-up books to him, mostly constitutional law and, of course, the Congressional Record. The later continence of my style is a miracle, considering those years of piping the additional remarks of Mr. Borah of Idaho.Collection: Children
Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracyCollection: Art
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.Collection: Morning
If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."Collection: Government
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.Collection: Love
The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity; of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything.Collection: Adjectives
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.Collection: Stars
The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.Collection: Family
Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.Collection: Love
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.Collection: Movie
In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.Collection: Doors
I Must warn you, Iris, that I'm not a believer. And though I'm sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn't for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble. And you must admit that the selection is wide, and dangerous to the amateur.Collection: Men
Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.Collection: Business
This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.Collection: Giving Up
Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.Collection: Morning
[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.Collection: New York
A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.Collection: Eye
My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.Collection: Country
People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.Collection: People
The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.Collection: Abandonment
The period of Prohibition - called the noble experiment - brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.Collection: Thinking
The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.Collection: Stupid
I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.Collection: Believe
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.Collection: Country
In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.Collection: Matter
Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.Collection: People
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.Collection: Journalism
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.Collection: Venice
The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Like Being Alone
I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.Collection: Country
I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.Collection: Army
In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.Collection: Government
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.Collection: Country