“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.”

“Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.”

“An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.”

“Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.”

“Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.”

“Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.”

“Folktales are real.”

“For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.”

“I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.”

“I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.”

“I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.”

“I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.”

“I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.”

“I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.”

“I suffer from everyday life.”

“I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.”

“I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.”

“I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!”

“I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works.”

“I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.”

“If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.”

“I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.”

“I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.”

“I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.”

“I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon.”

“In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.”

“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”

“Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.”

“My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.”

“My university work was not central to my education.”

“Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.”

“New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.”

“Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.”

“One writes fables in periods of oppression.”

“Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.”

“Rarely does an interviewer ask questions you did not expect. I have given a lot of interviews, and I have concluded that the questions always look alike. I could always give the same answers.”

“Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.”

“Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.”

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.”

“The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.”

“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”

“The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.”

“The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.”

“The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.”

“Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.”

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”

“Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.”

“What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?”

“What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.”

“When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.”

“Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”