…eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

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.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Resta-nos esclarecer a parte que nesse golfo fantástico cabe ao imaginário indireto, ou seja, o conjunto de imagens que a cultura nos fornece, seja ela cultura de massa ou outra forma de tradição. Esta questão...

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or...

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...

Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow ‘resembles’ the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the...

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...

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them …

For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects...

Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly...

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty – that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a...

Bağışla beni efendimiz: er geç o rıhtıma çıkacağım kuşkusuz,” der Marco, “ama dönüp sana anlatamayacağım onu. Böyle bir kent var, ve de basit bir sırrı var: yalnız gidişleri bilir, dönüşleri bilmez.

No se asombre de verme siempre vagando con los ojos. En realidad este es mi modo de leer, y solo así la lectura me resulta fructífera. Si un libro me interesa realmente, no logro seguirlo...

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...

Myśli te zaprawione były pewną goryczą ludzi starych, którzy więcej cierpią nad utratą rzeczy dawnych, niż cieszą się z nadejścia nowych.

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.

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or...

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and...

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it...

To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme...

La città di Leonia rifà se stessa tutti i giorni: ogni mattina la popolazione si risveglia tra lenzuola fresche, si lava con saponette appena sgusciate dall’involucro, indossa vestaglie nuove fiammanti, estrae dal più perfezionato frigorifero...

Già nella vetrina della libreria hai individuato la copertina col titolo che cercavi. Seguendo questa traccia visiva ti sei fatto largo nel negozio attraverso il fitto sbarramento di Libri Che Non Hai Letto che ti...

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so...

I’ve been in love for five hundred million years…

My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were...

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York...

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance,...

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be...

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that...

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered...

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...

A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Qualcosa che ci sfugge deve pur restare… Perche’ il potere abbia un oggetto su cui esercitarsi, uno spazio in cui allungare le sue braccia… Finche’ so che al mondo c’e’ qualcuno che fa dei giochi...

Don’t you ever get tired of reading?” she asked. “You could hardly be called good company! Don’t you know that, with women, you’re supposed to make conversation?” she added; her half smile was perhaps meant...

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...

If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few...

…Porque, uma vez que você começou – perorava -, não há nenhuma razão para parar. O passo entre a realidade que é fotografada na medida em que nos parece bonita e a realidade que nos...

[Brzask] jest to pora, kiedy przedmioty tracą konsystencję cienia, jaką darzyła je noc, i odzyskują po trochu właściwe sobie barwy; ale najpierw przechodzą jeszcze przez coś niby strefę pośrednią, niejasną, zaledwie muśnięte czy raczej otoczone...

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read...

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the...

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!…...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past...

É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.