I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.

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

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

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.