Gore Vidal Quotes

As mortals, we're ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

We're all born into this world. Some are placed gently, others thrust into it, and still others abandoned.

Luck has a lot to do with how your life develops.

Yes, there's a luck in most things; and in none more than being born at the right time.

You're not always able to choose.

Well, we all are what we are, I guess you might say by an accident of birth.

As you get older, you learn there are some things out of your control.

Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.

Everything that happens is meant to be. It's meant to happen like that. But sometimes you don't know at the time that it's meant to be disaster.

In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.

Personally, I would say the 'master' of this whole thing is fate... Whoever is on the playing field is fair game, and it's up to them to avoid being used.

We like to believe we are in control of our destinies, even though we never are and we never have been.

Life is a pre-existing condition.

It is really strange how life works, isn't it?

There are so many things that you have no control over: whether you play or not, whether you get traded or not, or whether you get waived or not.

Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.

Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

Niall: We're tossed by the winds of fate. Once we end where they blow us, we make of ourselves that we will.

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future

How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse -- borne away with every breath!