Gore Vidal
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.
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.
Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
The unfed mind devours itself.
Never have children, only grandchildren.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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.
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.
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
In actual fact, I have always been a conservative cross, borne sadly by liberal friends.
My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
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.
It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.
I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters.
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
Love is not my bag.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
We're not a democracy.
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.
Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
Does one ever read a politician's books?
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.'
I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.
I'm always an optimist!
As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.