841 Quotes by Gore Vidal

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you’ve been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society – that is decadence.

The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really – class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.

We’ve had parallel lives. And frankly, I prefer mine to his. I would not like to be George Bush.

The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I’d be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

We’re supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don’t practice this glorious act.

It is my task always to know, particularly when I don’t.