841 Quotes by Gore Vidal

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.