For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!