You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

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.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.