The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.