# Gore Vidal

- Quotes: 52
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal

## Books

- [At Home](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/at-home.md) — 7 quotes
- [Homage to Daniel Shays](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/homage-to-daniel-shays.md) — 4 quotes
- [Julian](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/julian.md) — 26 quotes
- [Palimpsest: A Memoir](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/palimpsest-a-memoir.md) — 3 quotes
- [United States](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states.md) — 12 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.

p. 162 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/palimpsest-a-memoir/i-used-to-be-able.md)

> Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

p. 311 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/palimpsest-a-memoir/celebrities-are-invariably.md)

> Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln's bowels, whose 'frequency,' he tells us, 'cannot be documented.' But, of course, they can. 'Truth-teller' Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence 'wrong.'

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/current-is-also.md)

> In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/at-home/in-a-nation.md)

> World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/world-events-are.md)

> I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/at-home/i-suspect-that.md)

> Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/basler-finds-my-lincoln.md)

> ...American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/american-society-literary.md)

> After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/after-four-centuries.md)

> Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/nothing-that-shakespeare.md)

> Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/at-home/class-is-the.md)

> What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom's land much less bravery's home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gore-vidal/united-states/what-is-going.md)