Gore Vidal Quotes

Spending is an addiction.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed - not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation - why you smoke in the first place - rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots.

Gambling undermines the moral fiber of society.

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

Eventually, alas, I realized the main purpose of buying cocaine is to run out of it.

No one shuts their laptop after looking at pornography and says, 'What a productive time I just spent connecting with the world!'

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

Before I dismiss this affair of eating and drinking, let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle, if, unhappily, you have been bred up in such slavery.

Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.

The appetite grows for what it feeds on.

One thing leads to another? Not always. Sometimes one thing leads to the same thing. Ask an addict.

By the way, pornography? It's a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora's box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed.

Drug culture is extremely prevalent and probably most people know somebody whose life has been affected by drugs, if it's not their own or in their own family, they have friends. It's a never-ending process.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me

Don't be too quickTo break bad habits: better stick,Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic.

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

I was just taking out my trash and I had, like, 300 cans of Diet Coke. It was just like, 'How did that happen?' I don't even remember buying them. I also like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. My addictions are pretty much the only things I consume.

What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.

...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.

We can do without any article of luxury we have never had; but when once obtained, it is not in human natur' to surrender it voluntarily.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers.