Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing