Gore Vidal

“Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take ov...”

“After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.”

“I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not...”

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

“I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.”

“Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'”

“Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed...”

“Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.”

“The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.”

“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”

“It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.”

“I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier...”

“On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”

“Envy is the central fact of American life.”

“Friends, there is no Left in American politics.”

“That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.”

“No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? T...”

“For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one wo...”

“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 u...”

“I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.”