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

Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.

Shame can be self-indulgence too.

It is like a party all the time; nobody has to worry about giving one or being invited; it is going on every day in the street and you can go down or be part of it from your window.

Rome is everybody's memory.

To be first-rate at anything you have to stake your all. Nobody's an artist 'on the side'.

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.