90 quotes
What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)
I’m an agnostic, which is the only rational position.
Prospect interview (2010)
It's all very irrational, like all ideology.
Playboy interview (2003)
The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.
London Fields (1989)
Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing' — deliberately, at least — to please the other.
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
The universe is far more bizarre, prodigious and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and … spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift.
The Pregnant Widow (2010)
Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
Off the Page: Martin Amis (2003)
[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist.
For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.
Einstein's Monsters (1987)
Saddam's hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for "the wet stuff".
The Palace of the End (2003)
This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era — the era of images and perceptions. Wind conditions were also favourable; within hours, Manhattan looked as though it had taken 10 megatons.
Fear and loathing (2001)
It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds . . . Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world.
Playboy interview (2003)
I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut.
The voice of the lonely crowd (2002)
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact — all that?
London Fields (1989)
In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed.
Playboy interview (2003)