“One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.”
More from Gore Vidal
“Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him…”
“I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls…”
“In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant,…”
“There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.”