No one is less tolerable, even to themselves, than the person who meets with early success. 

Assured of their ineffable greatness, jealous of early victories, the greater the level of success the more someone becomes a prisoner of the castle they built with their own hands, unable to escape from the grim pictures staring down at them - as in a Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price - from the walls that only pretend to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the saved from the damned, the holy from the unholy.

 

 

There can be no doubt that the slow inevitable slide into the sea awaiting each of us is made a lot longer and steeper starting from the top of a mountain.