It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.