what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it — a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.
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.
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.
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.
I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.
…Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
…the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another’s presence.
The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.
Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face
…eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.
It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them …
Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.
A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi’s orgasm reflected in her daughter’s gaze.
The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.
Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.
They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
When you’re young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.
the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.
Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
We’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.
Memory’s 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.
although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.
I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.
…And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn’t found mine.
The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.
With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.
again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
I’m accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
It is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.
Every morning I tell myself, ‘Today has to be productive’ – and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.