“It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.”

“When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”

“Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”

“I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.”

“We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

“I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”