How smartly September comes in, like a racing gig, all style, no confusion.

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.

Shame can be self-indulgence too.

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

Rome is everybody's memory.

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

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