The Happy Ending Is Our National Belief.

If Someone Tells You He Is Going To Make A 'realistic Decision', You Immediately Understand That He Has Resolved To Do Something Bad.

Like Michelangelo And Cellini, Florentines Of Every Station Are Absorbed In Acquiring Real Estate: A Little Apartment That Can Be Rented To Foreigners; A Farm That Will Supply The Owner With Oil, Wine, Fruit, And Flowers For The House.

I Once Started A Detective Story To Make Money—but I Couldn't Get The Murder To Take Place! At The End Of Three Chapters I Was Still Describing The Characters And The Milieu, So I Thought, This Is Not Going To Work. No Corpse!

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.

We Are The Hero Of Our Own Story.