The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
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.
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.
Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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 also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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.
Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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.