It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Interpretation
Good literature must be rooted in the author's real-life experiences.
Gore Vidal emphasizes the importance of authenticity in literature, suggesting that for a work to be considered truly good, it should reflect the genuine experiences and truths of the author. This notion challenges writers to draw from their own lives, ensuring that their stories resonate with honesty and depth.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of story in writing workshops.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
We have our factory, which is called a stage. We make a product, we color it, we title it and we ship it out in cans.
An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life can offer.
I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.
And for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
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