If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

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.

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space

Arriving at each new city, the traveler 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.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.