A Novelist Is An Elephant, But An

All Ideas Advanced To Deal With The Florentine Noise Problem, The Florentine Traffic Problem, Are Utopian, And Nobody Believes In Them, Just As Nobody Believed In Machiavelli's Prince, A Utopian Image Of The Ideally Self-interested Despot.

Congress-these, For The Most Part, Illiterate Hacks Whose Fancy Vests Are Spotted With Gravy, And Whose Speeches, Hypocritical, Unctuous, And Slovenly, Are Spotted Also With The Gravy Of Political Patronage.

Maybe Any Action Becomes Cowardly Once You Stop To Reason About It.

For Both Writer And Reader, The Novel Is A Lonely, Physically Inactive Affair. Only The Imagination Races.

When You Have Committed An Action That You Cannot Bear To Think About, That Causes You To Writhe In Retrospect, Do Not Seek To Evade The Memory: Make Yourself Relive It, Confront It Repeatedly Over And Over, Till Finally, You Will Discover, Through Sheer Repetition It Loses Its Power To Pain You. It Works, I Guarantee You, This Sure-fire Guilt-eradicator, Like A Homeopathic Medicine - Like In Small Doses Applied To Like. It Works, But I Am Not Sure That It Is A Good Thing.