Gore Vidal: I had seen a movie called The Mystery of the Blue Room, I think it was called. I can’t find it in any of the encyclopedias, but I remember liking it very much, and so I wrote “The Mystery of the Blue Room.” Yes, I was a plagiarist very early, just borrowed it from the movie. Nobody noticed. Nobody had seen it in my family. There I was, retelling the story, but I was using family characters, my grandmother, who was a wonderful woman, very, very intelligent, but she never listened to anybody. She wasn’t deaf, she just didn’t like listening to people. She didn’t like talking that much either. She would occasionally say something intelligent, but she would miss an entire conversation because she’d be thinking about other things. And then she would ask the subject of what we were talking about. We said, “But we told you a few minutes ago.” “Oh, is that what it’s about?” And she would just drift off. So I was already using other people’s characteristics to decorate my tales.