- [1976] It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
- A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
- [1998] The [United States] empire is going to strike back at the Internet in the interest of protecting our children from porn, drugs and terrorism - all of which the U.S. government will claim is being peddled by the Internet.
- [asked to describe himself in one word] Realist.
- [1981] A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
- Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. [William Shakespeare] has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
- [1995] Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
- The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
- I'm a born-again atheist.
- [1988] I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
- Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects.
- [2004] One day the Bush family may develop a conscience and they may develop some idea of statesmanship. But that day is nowhere near, that the Bush family will ever be anything but dishonorable. And so, we can't wait, but we've got to discuss how they have dishonored us and what they have done wrong, and replace them - with anything, at the moment.
- I find stupidity very exciting. And I'm excited all day long.
- [on the United States] It is a pointless empire, which gives a satirist like me great pleasure, the fact that nothing makes any sense.
- Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.
- [2004] We pay large taxes to the government. The rich don't but the average working person does. We're the only First-World country that gets nothing back. There's no health service. The educational system is pre-Copernicus. It's a scandal. But the Americans don't know it because they have never been told about other countries. They just know they're bad.
- To write a script today means working for a committee of people who know nothing about movies, as opposed, say, to real estate or the higher art of bookkeeping.
- [in 1956] 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.
- Homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual. There wasn't anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said 'oh no, that's the worst thing you could be.'
- I don't go to movies for love, do you?
- It's realism. Life is mostly luck!
- [upon learning of Truman Capote's death] Good career move.
- [2007] I do a lot of reading of the dead. I finally got around after 50 years to reading all of Aristotle. He's very good on republics, how they always come a cropper, and why. Required reading. Republics, once lost, don't easily come back.
- The only time I went on stage, in the part of Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer on Broadway, was right after Howard Austen [his companion of 53 years] died. Before I knew it, I was standing out there in front of the audience. It was the best thing I ever did. If you want to drown your grief, play on Broadway.
- [1979] There is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal.
- [upon returning to California when his partner Howard Austen required special treatment] It was an intelligent thing to live in California, [but now] as the American dictatorship gets going, I don't know if it's the right setting to say farewell to the Republic.
- The protocols for impeachment are meant to be used. Of course Dick Cheney should be impeached, and then I would impeach the president. They are guilty of high crimes against the Constitution of the United States. We have a bad government, just out of control. We have turned into a very ugly, totalitarian society.
- [on America during the George W. Bush years] Never have so many things gone so wrong all at once. Saboteurs and thieves have been in charge of every part of government.
- [on Thomas Gore] I remember my grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, always said: "This whole country is based on only one thing: due process of law, involving Habeas Corpus." The only good thing England gave us was the Magna Carta, which he regarded as sacred.
- [on his 53-year relationship with Howard Austen] It is very easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible when it does.
- My grandmother would say, "If it's in the newspapers, it's just not true." That was our automatic take.
- William Faulkner told me not to fall into the trap F. Scott Fitzgerald did. He thought you could make something out of a movie. You can't. Go, get the money, go home, write your books.
- [on Eugene L. Vidal] My father [Eugene] was asked, "How do you explain Gore's courage?" "Courage about what?" replied my father. "It's not courageous if you don't care what people think of you." He had my number. Of course, one does care, but which kind of people is the question.
- [on Hollywood in the 1950s] We did too much. Someone would ring up and say, "We've got a bar, a bedroom and a kind of ballroom. We've got Paul Newman and Vincent J. Donehue is going to direct. Can you think of a play?" In three or four days you'd write something to fit the sets and the cast.
- [on postwar America circa 1945-1950] For the first time, the US was not involved in a war. The Depression was over. Suddenly, there were 13 million of us who'd served in the military and were home. There was a cultural burst that Americans had never known before: we became number one for things like ballet. We had dozens of first-rate poets, several not so bad novelists, wonderful music, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. It was a great moment, and it lasted for five years.
- The best thing about being Anglophone is that you have two countries.
- [1973] Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
- Shit has its own integrity.
- [on John McCain's 2008 Republican presidential campaign] He went to a private school and came bottom of his class. He smashed up his airplane and became a prisoner of war, which he is trying to parlay into "war hero." He's a goddamned fool. He was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he does not know what a mortgage is.
- But John F. Kennedy had great charm. So has Barack Obama. He's better educated than Jack. And he's been a working senator. Jack never went to the office - he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.
- [on John F. Kennedy] I never believed in John F. Kennedy's charisma. He was one of our worst presidents. Robert F. Kennedy was a phony, a little Torquemada and their father [Joseph P. Kennedy] was a crook - should have been in jail.
- [on Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic Party nomination campaign] I liked the idea of him, but he never managed to get my interest. I was brought around by his overall intelligence - specifically when he did his speech on race and religion. He's our best demagogue since Huey Long or Martin Luther King.
- [on the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries] I think [Hillary Clinton's] strategy is more or less insane. I'd always rather liked her. She's a perfectly able lawyer . . . But this long campaign [for the presidency], this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy.
- The George W. Bush people have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back.
- [commenting on the vast Jerusalem set for Ben-Hur (1959)] This Jerusalem is the Jerusalem of Jesus Christ. He could move through the city and feel that he was absolutely at home. He would know where to go to order a pizza.
- [on Truman Capote] Capote should be heard, not read.
- Those presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs and leave the important matters to serious people.
- [on Carson McCullers] Of all our Southern writers, Carson McCullers is the one most likely to endure.
- [when asked by David Frost if his first sexual experience was heterosexual or homosexual] I was too polite to ask.
- [on Anita Bryant] As to Anita's fear that she'll be assassinated, the only people who might shoot Anita Bryant are music lovers.
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