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.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

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

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.