More on Gore

Jay Parini, the American poet, novelist, biographer and critic lived near Vidal in Italy and became a close friend. From his CNN remembrance:

I would read drafts of things that he wrote, too, and we talked endlessly about the craft of writing.
     He really did seem to know everything there was to know about this. Once, for instance, I was sitting with him and said: “I'm writing a novel in which two characters talk about Kierkegaard for about 20 pages. Can I get away with this?" With a twinkle, after a slight pause, he replied, "You can do that. But only if these characters are sitting in a railway car, and the reader knows there is a bomb under the seat."

Also from CNN, this, from native Nebraskan Dick Cavett:

Like all writers (it's almost safe to say) he was a big drinker. (See Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cheever, Mailer, et al.) I once startled Gore by saying I'd just read that each drink kills more than 10,000 brain cells. He paled. "But you've got billions of brain cells," I reassured him. Gore responded: "But I've had billions of drinks."
     In my notorious show known now through the ages as "Cavett's Mailer/Vidal Fight," there was a particular answer of Gore's to a challenge by Norman Mailer that actually got applause for, I think, its simple elegance: Gore had gotten a laugh, a feat difficult for Mailer to achieve. The exchange went:

Mailer: Why don't you try to talk just once, Gore, without yuks? Why not just talk to me instead of talking to the audience?
Vidal: Well, by a curious thing we have not found ourselves in a friendly neighborhood bar, but both, by election, are sitting here with an audience, so therefore it would be dishonest of us to pretend otherwise (applause).

Hard to imagine Mitt Romney fashioning that sentence.