Literature is the magic filter that selects the essence of the qualities and defects of a nation, that awakens its national consciousness and keeps it alive, that fixes a nation on a certain land.
The true, precious modernism means the zeal to produce aesthetic values dressed in the spirit of the time, but with a higher level than the previous era...
The true artist must organically appropriate everything that has been produced of value in his field up to his own and add to it what he has... This addition, this addition, is true modernism, which would be valuable regardless of whether it appears in a romantic chlamy, in a realistic coat or in symbolic lace. It is not the labels that are decisive in art, but the aesthetic value.
If you look at art as creation, you must also assign it an ethical value. Art as a light toy would be as incomprehensible as life considered pointless.
The scientist generalizes, the artist individualizes.
My literature is something like letters to myself which I would allow you to read.
In Literature, truth is distinguished from untruth just as natural flowers are distinguished from artificial ones; through a kind of inimitable smell.
A classic is a writer who watches over tradition.
Nature is not definitive; something can always be added to it.
Strange job and literature: the less you do, the better you have to do it.
It is painful to write a book: it means to free yourself from it.
Perhaps the inspiration is nothing but the joy of writing; it does not precede it.
We should not say that we are re-reading the masterpieces, because it always seems to us that we have never read them.
Every work of ours must be a crisis, almost a revolution.
Truth is not always art. Art does not always mean truth, but truth and art have points of contact: I look for them.
All people have seen almost the same things, but only the artist knows how to rewrite them in his memory.
Art tends to a particular reality: if it touches it, it incorporates itself into the real that participates in the eternal fact and thus incorporates itself into time.
The poet: ... a giant who effortlessly passes through the eye of a needle, and, at the same time, a dwarf who fills the universe.
Generally at the present moment we all agree to recognize in literature a function and certain powers that go far beyond its old role of entertainment, glorification or ornament. We like to see in it an expression of the choices, obsessions and issues at the heart of personal existence…
In short, literary creation appears to us from now on as an experience, or even as a self-practice, as an exercise of apprehension and genesis during which a writer tries to understand himself and at the same time to build himself.
Elaborating a great literary work is nothing more than discovering a true perspective on yourself, on life, on people. And literature is an adventure of being.
Without the aid of the arts, very few of our experiences can be compared, and without such comparison we can hardly hope ever to agree on which are to be preferred...
In the arts are stored, in the only possible way, experiences which have imposed themselves on the most sensitive beings, endowed with special discernment... Thus, the arts, properly approached, provide the most valuable data available for deciding which experiences are more valuable.
If everyday reality seems poor to you, don't blame it; blame yourself for not being enough of a poet to illuminate its wealth.
To sing is to exist...
Works of art are mystical experiences whose eternal life lives alongside our fleeting lives.
A work of art is good when it was born from an urge. Her origin alone justifies her, and nothing else.
The true artist always expresses what he thinks, at the risk of overturning all established prejudices.
Art only begins with inner truth.
The poet: ... the one who always sits with his forehead in the golden dust of his insomnia.