I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages… all forms of communication – visual, tactile, and so on… There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.

Hitler’s one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.”

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals 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.

Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

Madmen and children always speak the truth.

Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.

If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to ‘dissolve’ harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

The followers must feel besieged.

We’ve been led astray by rationalist thought,” Diotallevi said. “I keep telling you.

But then the light of reason has rarely been of any real use to people who live in darkness.

If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic.

Not bad, not bad at all,” Diotallevi said. “To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Human beings are religious animals.

World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.

The mobile phone… is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

As the Chinese said, to curse someone: “May you live in an interesting period.

I like the image of the undecided writer who is unable to put the pen down. It means he is alive.

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.

I write what I write.

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

I like lists, but I am suspicious of them.

Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

Writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

If I’ve got to be afraid of something, I’m afraid of the continuation of everyday life, with its inevitable breaches.

There was no plot… and I discovered it by mistake.

To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn’t exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Superstition brings bad luck.

Musical compositions can be very sad – Chopin – but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

I write for five or six hours in the morning and I’m through with it by lunchtime.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.

The university is to be a temple, and a joke; the temple stands for the unshakable orthodoxy, the joke for the creative innovation.

Simple mechanisms do not love.

I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.

It is not the job of writers to tell us how to think; it is their job to tell us what we think.

The language of Europe is translation.

Translation is a very profound human experience.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.”

Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.

Man’s principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?

Theory doesn’t mean anything until it’s put into practice.

The grandeur of Jerusalem is also… its problem.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC.

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

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

I think I like my brain best in a bar fight with all the facts knocked out of it and nothing left but the ambition to be a brain.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

There is nothing in the world that I hold.

The fact is that books were not made to be believed. (Or to be believed or disbelieved.

Libraries can take the place of God.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The mind shall not resign itself.

I am a philosopher, not a king. But the truth is generally seen and rarely heard.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

I love the smell.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents.

A person who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing.

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power – bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

There is nothing more personal than a book.

I don’t know, maybe we’re always looking for the right place, maybe it’s within reach, but we don’t recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.

Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon… The book has been thoroughly tested, and it’s very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

We like lists because we don’t want to die.

We live for books.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

Translation is the art of failure.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality.

If I keep revising my text, it’s because I continue to discover new meanings in it.

Limits are a precious resource. We should preserve them.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

The paradox is that I have no desire to destroy the idea of God; I simply want to let it exist.

We are all parts of a single being, and it is not possible to hurt a part without hurting the whole.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

I am not the one who will say that technology is better than art. Technology is in the hands of the people.

Those who do not believe in magic will never find it.

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature.

To survive, you must tell stories.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

But what is the purpose of literature? We don’t know. Literature is a river.

Our life lacks a narrative structure.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.