Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.
The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.
I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing
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.
Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.
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.