I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

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

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.