Words Fail Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal has died. Perhaps you most treasured him for mixing it up with awful racist William F. Buckley, as above. (The aesthete Buckley called Vidal "a queer.") We loved him best for (okay, Burr , but also) this:

He and brute Norman Mailer were at a party when Mailer laid him out with one punch. From the floor, Vidal looked up at him, and (the precise quotation varies) intoned like a total catty bitch, "Words fail Norman Mailer once again."

[ NYT ]