A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

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.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.