hum

I was talking to Woody Allen’s manager, Jeff Rawlins, and he said he used to handle Lenny Bruce. I said, “Oh, I knew Lenny, what did you think of him?” And he said, “He sinned against his talent.” That line changed my life, I threw away all kinds of corruption out of my system, I just went back to being pretty normal.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Class determines destiny and income more certainly than it did 50 years ago. That’s a shocking fact for a country used to the idea of never-ending social progress.

Porto Cervo was built in the 1960s by Prince Karim Aga Khan and it has long been a playground for the super-rich. Earlier this month, the sign at the entrance to the Costa Smeralda was altered, apparently by an insufficiently prosperous holidaymaker armed with a spray can. The “Smeralda” was deleted and replaced with the word “troppo”, so it now reads in Italian: “It costs too much.”