Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

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.

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

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