When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God...

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an ‘idealistic’...

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among...

[…] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions become widely accessible, they cease to be accessible. Technology is inherently democratic, because it promises the same services to all;...

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.

Not bad, not bad at all,” Diotallevi said. “To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the...

No cierres mis labios abriendo los tuyos.

But now 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...

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the...

The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” …The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the...

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the...

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in...

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected...

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means…

The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of...

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

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.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (“en me retraçant ces détails, j’en suis à me demander s’ils sont réels, ou...

For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in...

He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right,...

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Translation is the art of failure.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

L’essere umano è davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato città, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc… Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai...

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the...

I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp...

the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after...

315Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on...

The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn’t always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has...

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with...

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it...

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from...

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn’t believe in it?