Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman.