Parenting & Family Quote by Gore Vidal

“Never have children, only grandchildren” is Vidal at his most elegantly barbed: a one-liner that pretends to be lifestyle advice while smuggling in an entire worldview about power, obligation, and the family as a social trap. The joke works because it’s structurally impossible. You can’t skip the messy middle. Vidal’s wit depends on that impossibility, turning parental labor into something like an administrative error you’d be foolish to accept.

The subtext is a refusal of compulsory sentimentality. Parenthood, in the American moral imagination, is treated as a credential: proof you’ve matured, settled down, become legible. Vidal flips that script. Children represent decades of responsibility, sacrifice, and social conformity; grandchildren represent the payoff without the penance, the pleasure without the permanent identity shift. It’s an aristocratic fantasy disguised as common sense, and Vidal knows it. He’s mocking the way society romanticizes the grind while quietly rewarding those who can outsource it.

Context matters: Vidal spent his life as a public contrarian, skeptical of institutions that demand loyalty while offering hypocrisy in return - government, church, patriotism, and yes, the family. As a gay man of his era, he also lived outside the default life track and watched “normal” domesticity sold as destiny. The line isn’t anti-child so much as anti-myth: a cynical, funny rejection of the idea that suffering is automatically virtuous. It lands because it punctures a sacred cow with a cocktail-party laugh, then leaves the bruise to bloom.