The fresh start is always an illusion but a necessary one.

Even a tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to go out is to go home.

Rome is ... an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn.

Anybody who's against birth control and abortion has to be a criminal idiot.

Even the stupidest cat seems to know more than any dog.

I think you write only out of a great trouble. A trouble of excitement, a trouble of enlargement, a trouble of displacement in yourself.

If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. [They] shiver you for a split second.