Wealth & Money Quote by Gore Vidal

Luxury, for Gore Vidal, isn’t chrome or coastline; it’s carbon paper and clean margins. The line works because it weaponizes a familiar bragging structure and flips the expected payoff. We’re set up for the standard rich-guy confession about toys, then Vidal swerves to something both nerdier and more revealing: the ability to generate versions. Not “a manuscript,” but “as many freshly typed drafts as possible” - a phrase that smells like office toner, not champagne.

The specific intent is to demystify writing by emphasizing labor over inspiration, while quietly re-mystifying it as the only indulgence worth having. Vidal is telling you what he values when the constraints loosen: not status objects, but editorial freedom. In his era, “freshly typed” meant real money - paying typists, retyping whole sections, the slow, costly mechanics of revision before word processors made iteration cheap. He’s pointing to a material fact about authorship: craft depends on infrastructure. Talent still needs a pipeline.

Subtextually, it’s also a class commentary with a Vidal edge. Wealth, he implies, is most interesting when it buys time and precision rather than spectacle. The pleasure isn’t consumption; it’s control - over language, over the process, over the self. Drafts are where arguments sharpen, where tone becomes weapon-grade, where the novelist turns impulse into sentence-level authority. For a writer who thrived on rhetorical dominance and public combat, the real yacht is a better version of the paragraph.