Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

Fashions in sin change.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.