“I had seen [Ronald Reagan] in the flesh for a decade or so as each of us earned his mite in the Hollyjungle. Ronnie was already notorious for his speeches for General Electric, excoriating communists who were, apparently, everywhere. I had never actually spoken to him at a party because I knew—as who did not?—that although he was the soul of amiability when not excoriating the international monolithic menace of atheistic godless communism, he was, far and away, Hollywood's most grinding bore—Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader's Digest, which he studied the way Jefferson studied Montesquieu.”

--Gore Vidal, “Ron and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” from The New York Review of Books, September 29, 1983

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