Gore Vidal

“Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.”

“Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.”

“There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.”

“Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.”

“There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

“I'm always an optimist!”

“I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic.”

“For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.”

“I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.”

“Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.”

“The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.”

“As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we n...”

“The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.”

“I am not, at heart, a playwright.”

“There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.”

“An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.”

“Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.”

“I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.”

“During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.”

“You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?”