Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.

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.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

How well I would write if I were not here!

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.