The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.