A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.