When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

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.

You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.

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

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.

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

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