The unfed mind devours itself.
- "Gore's Lore," Vanity Fair, September 1992.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
- Interview by Michiko Kakutani, "Vidal: 'I'm at the Top of a Very Tiny Heap,'" The New York Times, March 12, 1981.
Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.
- as quoted by Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's, October 1978.
Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.
- Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 2006
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
- (Source attribution sought; contact gorevidalpages-at-gmail.com)
Envy is the central fact of American life.
- "Gore Vidal," interview by Gerald Clarke, 1974, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 5th series, 1981.
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
- (Source attribution sought; contact gorevidalpages-at-gmail.com)
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
- Gerard Irvine, "Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg," memorial service, December 8, 1976.
Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
- "Sex Is Politics" (1979)
Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
- Palimpsest : A Memoir, 1995.
Robert STANTON: [Y]ou once said something...about your first sexual experience. Do you recall it?
Gore VIDAL: Yes, I was asked if my first sexual experience was homosexual of heterosexual. I said I was too polite to ask.
- 1979 interview in Views From a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal (ed. Robert J. Stanton), 1980; referencing a televised interview with David Frost; also quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, September 16, 1973
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
- "Sex and the Law," Partisan Review, Summer 1965.
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 sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about. - "Sex Is Politics" (1979) in The Second American Revolution, 1983.
Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
- "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Case" (1980) in The Second American Revolution, 1983.
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