Gore Vidal Quotes

I love inappropriate humour. What else are you going to do? You have to laugh.

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.

But I don't distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I'll take either.

I really have to keep an eye on myself, because sometimes I think I might say something important.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.

I never think I'm making fun of my culture. In fact I'm making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.

Laughter is the best way to get over something or get closer to something. It's one of the things I respect most about Amy Schumer. She's found a way to get us closer to ourselves and see the ugly side of humanity, but not in a way that's pointing a finger or that's angry. She does it in a way that makes us see the absurdity and laugh at it.

The myth of my solitude makes me laugh.

I've never read a self help book... the most self-help I've read is on a beer mat.

I don't take myself or the species too seriously. You have to laugh at everything.

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.

I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.

When you see these characters like Captain America or Thor, laughing at their own situation or about how strange they are, then you are able to accept more readily that it's fine to wear a cape. You can also accept that it's fine to be enormous and green, or to shoot arrows at aliens racing through the sky. It all makes sense if you've been able to laugh at it and with it.

Fools laugh at others. Wisdom laughs at itself.

People say both Obama and I have trouble laughing at ourselves. We can't laugh at ourselves. That would be racist!

The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.

Anything I shouldn't laugh at makes me laugh.

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

If I had a sense of humor, I'd be laughing right now.

I kinda feel like an idiot sometimes. Although I am an idiot, so it kinda works out.

Do you laugh in the right places? Then, you’ll get along, in fair weather or foul. Humor is nothing less than a sense of the fitness of things. Something that’s out of proportion, like an inflated ego, should strike you funny, particularly if it’s your own inflated ego. Otherwise you are pathetic and quite hopeless.