We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.
To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, “We don’t know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning.” So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.
To survive, you must tell stories.
We live for books.
Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it’s more amusing – ugliness – than beauty.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.
When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.
To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it’s possible to understand something about truth.
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.
I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’m living in my private world. And it’s a great sensation.
Writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
Jacopo Belbo didnt understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself.
The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell – in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I’m involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.