Gore Vidal
During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.
Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
I hate nobody.
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
Corporations must pay tax.
I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
Gossip is conversation about people.
I can understand companionship.
Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.
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.
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
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.
Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
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.
TV news is not very instructive.
For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
I am only at home in the present.
I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.