The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of ‘depth’ is overestimated.
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.
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 what new forms they may assume.
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 always been the mainspring of culture.
For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.
You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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 expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
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 and come apart, the end of cities begins.
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 the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.