Gore Vidal Interview (page: 6 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

How would you describe the writer's life?

Gore Vidal: Mine has been very interesting.

I have lived in the world and taken part in many things outside myself. The problem with most American writers is they only write about themselves, and they're not very interesting. I don't care about why the marriage went wrong and why the author left his wife for the au pair girl when he did not get tenure at Ann Arbor, which really broke his heart. I mean these books should be written on Kleenex and disposed of. But everybody's been told in the United States that he is interesting. "You are a very interesting person. I can just tell!" or "My feelings are just as good as your feelings." Well, that is a fairly true statement, but what's a feeling? We all have feelings and most of them are not worth dealing with. It's what you know, it's what you think, and if you have the gift of invention, very rare may I say, it's what you make up.
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What is a novelist's role in society, relationship to society?

Gore Vidal: It changes. I would say it's almost nonexistent now.

People have stopped reading novels. TV and video games have taken the place where novels were once. When I was young, everybody read them. Now it seems hardly anybody does. Publishers are screaming, but they've contributed a great deal to the collapse of the novel as a popular art form. They publish too many bad books. They've overpublished all sorts of things, and then they're surprised when nobody wants their wares, but that's a business decision, which has nothing to do with a creative one.
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What was your purpose in writing?

Gore Vidal: You try to get it down, what it is you see, what it is you think. When I was writing my first play, my producer was a very popular playwright called George Axelrod, a very bright guy. I was changing a TV play into a Broadway play, Visit to a Small Planet, and I would just knock out a couple of scenes in 20, 30 minutes. He said, "Think. Don't write." I said, "George, I only think when I write. I have no idea what I think about anything until I have written it," and then sometimes I am quite surprised and sometimes I am quite appalled, but anyway, this is how you get it done.
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As a writer, you have also been an advocate. Is a novelist, per force, a political player, a provocateur?

Gore Vidal: Some are, some are not, it depends on the novelist. I am pretty much engaged, as they say, in politics, a view of the world, which I like to express. That's all temperament. I would have been that if I had been a baker.

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