Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
Gore VidalI write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when Iโm doing fiction.
Gore VidalThe family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
Gore VidalMemory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.
Gore Vidal