Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.

I'm a born - again atheist.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death