“The real hero is always a hero by mistake.”

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

“There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake.”

“I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.”

“Books always speak of other books.”

“The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.”

“The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”