Quotes from a writer remembering Gore Vidal in the WaPo:
Consider his lacerating self-assessment: “I’m exactly as I appear,” he once said. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
At restaurants, Vidal always picked up the bill, explaining that this was to remind him that he wasn’t wealthy: “Rich people never pay,” he said.
Having fallen out of favor with the Kennedys, having figured on Nixon’s enemies list and now having been declared persona non grata by the Reagans, Vidal said he had scored a hat trick. But clearly he was annoyed that he was always, as the British say, “unclubbable.”