Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
One reads alone, even in another’s presence.
Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
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.
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
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.
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
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.
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 with a specific political party.
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!
When I’m writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I’ve really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.