Gore Vidal

I shouldn’t imagine that any American writer would want to do anything that reflected on the purity and the spontaneity of his genius at any phase of his sacred story. In the land of the free, one sentence must be as good as another because that is democracy. Only Henry James set out methodically to rewrite his early books for the New York editions. Some works he improved; others not. Tennessee, come to think of it, often rewrites old plays, stories . . . it’s sort of a tic with him. Returning to an earlier time, different mood.
-Gore Vidal, Paris Review