Gore Vidal

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

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.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

I__e always said, __ have nothing to say, only to add._ And it__ with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.