Zitat des Tages von Gore Vidal:
It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
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.
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.
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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.
Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
We're not a democracy.
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.
My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'
Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.
I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
