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Gore Vidal Quotes

Total quotes: 25
“Write something, even if it’s a suicide note.”
— Gore Vidal, Conversations with Gore Vidal
Tagged: Writing, Suicide
“Eventually all things are known. And few matter.”
— Gore Vidal, Burr: A Novel
Tagged: Knowledge, What Really Matters, Truth
“Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian: A Novel
Tagged: Being human, Strangeness
“We are all so simple at heart that become unfathomable to one another.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian
Tagged: Simplicity, heart, Unfathomable
“No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian: A Novel
Tagged: Truth, Honesty, Man, divinity
“Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.”
— Quintus Arrius, Ben-Hur
Tagged: Hate, strength, easter movies
“ I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of Gaius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am... a God.”
— Caligula, Caligola
Tagged: Rome, Caligula
“Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.”
— Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge
Tagged: Dust, Death, passing, Eternity, fury
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian
Tagged: Books, Places, Time, Ignorance
“Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.”
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar
Tagged: Relationship, Feelings
“Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.”
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar
Tagged: Death, Dust, Existence
“Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.”
— Gore Vidal,
Tagged: Sex, Sex Is..., Gore Vidal
“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect.”
— Gore Vidal, The Essential Gore Vidal
Tagged: write, Advice, Readers, Imagination
“History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian
Tagged: History, Truth, Deception
“In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death.”
— Gore Vidal, Creation: A Novel
Tagged: Life, Contradiction, Death, Birth, Cause
“Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before.”
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar: A Novel
Tagged: Past, present, Change
“Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”
— Gore Vidal, Screening History
Tagged: Loneliness, Imagination, solitary, Books, Movies
“The unfed mind devours itself.”
— Gore Vidal, via Facebook
Tagged: Mind, mind exercise, Mind Gym, Learning, continuous learning
“We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? Fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.”
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar: A Novel
Tagged: Existence, Connection, Relationship
“There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian: A Novel
Tagged: Terror, Fear, Ignorance, strange, Place
“A writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist).”
— Gore Vidal, The American Presidency
Tagged: writer, Journalists, Truth
“One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.”
— Gore Vidal, Julian
Tagged: Letters, Writing, Memories
“In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.”
— Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and of Fiction
Tagged: Religion, Books, Writing, Church
“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.”
— Gore Vidal, At Home: Essays, 1982-1988
Tagged: Theism, Monotheism, Belief, Religion, human race, system
“Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.”
— Gore Vidal, Messiah
Tagged: Life, Death, Fear
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