Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book..

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient….

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that l….

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….

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves ta….

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness..

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of….

Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has….

The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everyt….

The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could ….

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say..

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its ….

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears..

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky..

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies..

...Life is nothing but trading smells..

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give t….

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world..

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading..

In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices..

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!.