Gore Vidal

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

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.

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

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

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

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.

It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.

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

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create ''one world.'' Instead of one world, we have ''star wars,'' and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo -- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.