We Can Surmount The Anger We Feel.

Nobody Can Be Kinder Than The Narcissist While You React To Life In His Own Terms.

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.

I Became, And Remain, My Characters' Close And Intent Watcher: Their Director, Never. Their Creator I Cannot Feel That I Was, Or Am.

As A Novelist, I Cannot Occupy Myself With "characters," Or At Any Rate Central Ones, Who Lack Panache, In One Or Another Sense, Who Would Be Incapable Of A Major Action Or A Major Passion, Or Who Have Not A Touch Of The Ambiguity, The Ultimate Unaccountability, The Enlarging Mistiness Of Persons "in History." History, As More Austerely I Now Know It, Is Not Romantic. But I Am.

We Can Surmount The Anger We Feel. To Find Oneself Like A Young Tree Inside A Tomb Is To Discover The Power To Crack The Tomb And Grow Up To Any Height.