Roberto Calasso

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.

Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.

Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.

Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.

The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.