Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.