=Gore Vidal on Whether or Not He has Time for You=

Isherwood and I used to play around with the notion of what it would be like to know the entire future of someone we had just met, rather as if we could skip to the back of a book to see how things turned out, as Montaigne always did, eager to read how the protagonist died even before he knew how he had lived. Then, knowing the ending, one would address a new person accordingly: "Sorry, I have no time to waste on you. Next summer you'll be dead on Route 9W in a car accident, and by the time I'm sixty-five, I will have forgotten your name."