Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven't got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose - why haven't I got it?

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.