After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.