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.

All oppression creates a state of war.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.