The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.