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

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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

When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.