“In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth—or even on campus—wants to read.”

--Gore Vidal, “Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas,” The New York Review of Books, December 4, 1980