Quotes by Gore Vidal

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

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

“Write something, even if its just a suicide note.”

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

“It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true”

“Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.”

“Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable”

“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.”

“Todays public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they cant read them either.”

“Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.”

“Im homosexual... How and why are idle questions. Its a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.”

“I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated all my homosexual patients are quite sick - to which I finally replied so are all my heterosexual patients;”

“Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.”

“Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo -- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.”

“Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of ones own cherished beliefs.”

“Fashion is what you adopt when you dont know who you are.”

“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.”

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

“Thats the problem with religion: you beat your way past the clerics, fight your way through the demons, stand before the holy of holies, and when you rip away the veil, theres nothing there but a mirror”