'He's attractive to me, but it's the world of my family in Mississippi, so it has added resonance. The Faulkners and the Gores were practically in the same county in northern Mississippi, haunted by Indians. He's like a member of the family.'

On the Beats

'They were rather unadventurous in the art of prose. Jack Kerouac (above) went in for the run-on sentence. William Burroughs was often terribly good when stoned, but stoned prose in the long run is a bit like a Chinese dinner.'

On contemporary writers

'I can't say that I think much about contemporary writers. In my lifetime, the only writer that I've entirely admired, that I thought of as a great writer, was Italo Calvino. Then others along the way. Of the Americans, there was Tennessee Williams for the theatre, there was Paul Bowles for the short story.'

On Dawn Powell

'I resurrected her with not much help from the publishing world. Now she's very, very popular for the first time, although she's 30 years dead.'

On editors

'Along came in the 20s a bunch of near-illiterates, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who couldn't spell. Max Perkins, his hack editor at Scribner, would help him turn his prose into recognisable English. Somehow in the world of hackdom it's got out that every writer needs a stern person as teacher behind him, who will tell him 'i before e except after c'. I've never known a good writer who needed an editor. Many of them have been destroyed by good editors. Luckily, no one knows how to edit any more either, so I think that phase is over.'

On Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh (above, with whom Vidal maintained a correspondence up until his execution in 2001)

'He was very aware of the loss of our constitutional liberties. He would have made a good constitutional lawyer had he gone the conventional route. He rebelled against the lawlessness of the country by doing something hugely unlawful.'

On Bill Clinton

'He was very intelligent, by and large, and intelligent people do not go into public life in America. Clever people sometimes do, but very intelligent ones don't. He was a master of the economy. He knew how to get through to the people on certain serious issues, when it's otherwise very hard to get their attention.'

On Hillary Clinton (below)

'She also is very intelligent. It isn't terribly common, particularly now that most of our politics is simply money. Whatever you can say about either Clinton, they give you the money's worth, although one can object to their slowness to condemn the war.'

On drugs

'If people want to kill themselves with pills, let them. Everybody has a right to suicide. It would be nice if we could encourage more people to do it.'