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.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

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.

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

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.