Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

— Gore Vidal

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjurer-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

— Gore Vidal

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.

— Gore Vidal

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

— Gore Vidal

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

— Gore Vidal

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.

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

— Gore Vidal

Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal