Gore vidal

We're not a democracy.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

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.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

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

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