Gore Vidal

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.

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.

Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan__ library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn__ finished coloring either one of them.

Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.