The Reading Room

“We live for books.”

“When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.”

“...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”

“A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”

“To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.”

“I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.”

“As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.”

“To survive, you must tell stories.”

“Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.”

“If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.”

“When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.”

“The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.”

“The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.”

“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.”

“The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.”

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

“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 was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.”

“There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”

“It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.”

“To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.”

“when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.”

“If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.”

“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.”

“Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.”

“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.”

“Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”

“My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.”

“I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.”

“We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.”

“When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.”

“As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.”

“At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.”

“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”

“If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.”

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

“Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.”

“The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.”

“I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.”

“When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.”

“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.”

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”

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

“History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.”

“I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.”

“I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.”

“I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.”