He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.