At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

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.

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world and, in the end, from politics. That was fortunate. The idea of putting literature in second place, after politics, is an enormous mistake, because politics almost never achieves its ideals.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.