“‘I just sort of drifted into it.’ That’s almost always the explanation for everything.” “Nothing is true except from a single point of view.”

“Life is short, but the art is long.”

“Long life, finally, is nightmarish repetition.”

“The present intrudes.”

“Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that’s glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don’t like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for their bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one.”

“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”

“I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”

“‘Politics’ is made up of two words, ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are blood-sucking insects.”

“A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man’s eyes to the nature of human existence.”

“An educated man must be bilingual.”

“Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.”

“What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.”

“A good deed never goes unpunished.”

“Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt. One’s family”

“Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s is the wrong one.”

“There is no such thing as a true account of anything.”

“Those who have not undergone minor disasters are being held in reserve for something major.”

“Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.”

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

“One’s neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.”

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

“Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.”

“The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.”

“Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels, and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself. “

“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”

“If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.”

“It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.”

“I have fouund that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough.”

“Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage.”

“I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.”

“Do nothing that is not natural-and ritual is natural-and all will be for the best.”

“Least said, soonest mended.”

“I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.”

“I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.”

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”

“True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don’t know quite as well as you know what you do know.”

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/vidal.html