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.

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

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.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.