I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.