My collection of rare books concerns only books that don’t tell the truth.
I felt like poisoning a monk.
All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake.
Sometimes my characters are not myself.
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
We like lists because we don’t want to die.
Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.
I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
Translation is the art of failure.