The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said….

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord..

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions..

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things..

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines..

So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls). It was the love so long await….

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do..

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness..

I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified w….

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world..

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had alwa….

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate agai….

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns ….

How well I would write if I were not here!.

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expr….

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be..

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say..

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhap….

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the….

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of o….