Gore Vidal

Table of contents

1 Gore Vidal (1925-) 2 Democracy 3 Palimpsest, a memoir 4 Attributed 4.1 Politics 4.2 Sex 4.3 TV

Gore Vidal (1925-)

Author

Democracy

• "We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don’t know how wise they were." Gore Vidal and the Mind of the Terrorist (ABC Radio National)

Palimpsest, a memoir

• "[Anaïs Nin] gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt."

Attributed

• "I am not my own subject."

• "A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

• "Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a small part of me dies."

• "At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."

• "More and more do we resemble a proliferating virus, destructive to other organisms, incapable of arresting itself, and so destined - manifestly! - to prevail or vanish furiously in space & time."

Politics

• "Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

• "Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."

• "My favorite sex fantasy is becoming president, so I can do it to 200,000,000 people at once."

Sex

• "Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don’t practice this glorious act."

• "I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair."

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

• "The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about."

• "I never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on TV."

TV

• "Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel."