My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from he….

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where….

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we fo….

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is a….

The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world and, in ….

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opp….

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or….

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches..

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itsel….

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining w….

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety an….

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expel….

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear..

Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt..

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story..

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in th….

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours..

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his j….