Gore Vidal

"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."

"To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights."

"The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible."

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then."

"I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent."

"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.'"

"That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers."

"The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once."

"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."