Gore Vidal Quotes

Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.

Caricature is rough truth.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly.

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

Conservative humor is frankly harder than liberal humor. You get points for just being liberal. You can get more points if you make fun of your own side sometimes.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure.

There's always been this tradition of satirizing these rich groups of people.

Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We're reflections. It's a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.