RIP Gore Vidal

"What matters finally is not the world’s judgment of oneself but one’s own judgment of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long, especially in America."

—G.V. on Norman Mailer in The Nation, 1960

Update on Friday, August 3, 2012 at 09:50PM by b.

And also: "And those who take solemnly the words of other men as absolute are, in the deepest sense, maiming their own sensibility and controverting the evidence of their own senses in a fashion which may be comforting to a terrified man but is disastrous for an artist."