Old Gore

An interview with Gore Vidal, who discusses his memoirs (he found Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend, to be as “hard as nails”) and creativity:

I think every writer has so many actors in his head, and when he wants to remember a book or something, it's like staging a play in your mind. Some writers have a huge cast of characters in their head that can work for them, Shakespeare being the great example. Somebody like Tennessee Williams, he had about a dozen people in his theater, and he had good parts for a lot of them. And some writers only have one [laughs]. I won't name names.

[HT: American Heritage ]

Update: Still another Vidal interview.