Novelist Quotes

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

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

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

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

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

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

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

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Translation is the art of failure.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

To be content with little is hard; to be content with much, impossible.

Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

None are so eager to gain new experience as those who don't know how to make use of the old ones.

If you have one good idea, people will lend you twenty.

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

The poor man wishes to conceal his poverty, and the rich man his wealth: the former fears lest he be despised, the latter lest he be plundered.

So soon as a fashion is universal, it is out of date.

Nobody knows enough, but many know too much.

Imaginary evils are incurable.