“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.”

“The great commander knows that in order to win one needs to know the remote and also the immediate reasons for the war, the capacities of the soldiers, which is to say the social and political make-up of the states, determining the variety, the quality and the character of the men.”

“Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilisation, Count Karolyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realise its importance, because "at that moment, 'that moment' had not yet become 'that moment'". The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. ”

“It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.”

“To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.”

“Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...”

“Siempre te ha gustado escribir, no importaba el qué, escribir y ya está; es el gesto lo que cuenta, gesto de poeta, gesto de rey, soberano albedrío sobre las pobres vocales y consonantes que aparecena tus órdenes y se ponen en fila, march en, alienación derech, rompan filas.”