'I value invention highly, and hardly anyone else does.'

INTERVIEWER

What sets you apart, do you think, from other American writers? 

VIDAL

My interest in Western civilization. Except for Thornton Wilder, I can think of no contemporary American who has any interest in what happened before the long present he lives in, and records. Also, perhaps paradoxically, I value invention highly, and hardly anyone else does. I don’t think I have ever met an American novelist who didn’t, sooner or later, say when discussing his own work, “Well, I really knew someone exactly like that. That was the way it happened, the way I wrote it.” He is terrified that you might think he actually made up a character, that what he writes might not be literally as opposed to imaginatively true. I think part of the bewilderment American book-chat writers have with me is that they realize that there’s something strange going on that ought not to be going on—that Myra Breckinridge might just possibly be a work of the imagination. “You mean you never knew anyone like that? Well, if you didn’t, how could you write it?”

—Gore Vidal, The Art of Fiction, The Paris Review (No. 59, Fall 1974)