"A writer always gets the last word."

Indeed.  From a rambling, but interesting, profile of Stephen Dixon (via Darby "Unrelated" Dixon):

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his famous visit to Washington in 1959, Dixon was among the pack of reporters cordoned off to one side of the Lincoln Memorial.

"I ducked under the rope and ran up the steps after him," Dixon says. "I could have been shot. I was calling, 'Premier Khrushchev! Premier Khrushchev!' He turned and said, through a translator:

"'Such a nice boy; such a nice boy. What do you want to ask me?'

"So I got a short interview. When I got back, all the other reporters wanted to know what he said, but I had to go back to my office and drop off the tape."

Because Dixon aggressively mines his past for material, the people in his life aren't always thrilled to find their exploits chronicled in his fiction.

"I used to warn my former girlfriends that I may write about this relationship somewhere down the road," he says.

"One woman I dated for four years was a filmmaker. I wrote about our relationship in Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story. When we broke up, she told me she was going to complain to the publisher about the book unless I gave her the movie rights.

"I agreed - and then I wrote about my negotiations with her in a story I titled The Moviemaker. That book came out in 1983, and when she opened it, she said, 'Not again.' She was quite angry.

"A writer always gets the last word."