Gore Vidal
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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.
I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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.
In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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.
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.
From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.
Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic.
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.
I am not, at heart, a playwright.
Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.
I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.