“I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.”

American writer and academic

Jay Parini is an American writer and academic, known for fiction, poetry, biography, and criticism. He has published 96 quotes on the site. His work includes novels centered on Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, and Herman Melville, along with a novelized memoir about a road trip with Jorge Luis Borges. Across these books, he often works at the border between literary history and imagined life, drawing on figures from the canon and the idea of the writer as subject.