Gore Vidal Quotes

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

Through language, we can tell the truth and hear the truth spoken, just as we can be deceived. Sometimes it's a painful realization: we can be lied to. As I write, I think of myself as putting my eye under oath, so that what I write is the truth about my characters.

In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted.

I think the truth is always interesting, but with politicians, you don't get to see much of that.

I think people are distrustful of politicians and are looking for someone who is telling the truth with no hidden agenda.

Being honest with the public is how they respect you.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

It's so much easier to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

Because no matter what you say in life, the truth will always be the truth. You know when someone is telling the truth, you look in the eyes. I have a tendency to believe people.

The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

The core of my writing is not art but truth.

Telling the truth, and confronting the challenge, is what politics is about.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Once you lose the honesty in a relationship, I mean, I think you don't have a relationship at all.

The thing that I've learned, not just from writing comics but also from writing television programs like 'Law & Order,' is that you can fool some of the people some of the time - but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference.

I doubt he knows himself when he’s not telling the truth.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever. But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

You don’t tell the truth just some of the time… The American people deserve the truth all of the time.