A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.
