The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.

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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

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Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.

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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.

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I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

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The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.

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