"We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else."

"People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified — which is sometimes useful."

"Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?"

"Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country."

"Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once."

"Everything's wrong on Wikipedia."

"You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"

"There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it."

"Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."

"We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes."

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst."

"Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

"Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives."

"Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States. He was everything they hated. So I just say that he represented life, and is admirable; and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing."

"We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns."

"Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."

"Yo, peep. This me name be Gore Vidal. I is spitting rhymes about early history. Why homies give props to Uzis, not books? Ain't nothing but a mystery, aight."

"Well, the Constitution has not yet been pregnant."

"Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life."

"Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth."

"One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 applied not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta."

"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."

"We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. 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."

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

"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."

"Anais 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."

"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)."

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

"The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all."

"I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."

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

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature."

"First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me."

"Envy is the central fact of American life."

"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

"American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither."

"There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place."

"Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors."

"On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact."

"We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers."

"Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last."

"The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did."

"We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself."

"Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition."

"No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity."