The most important point is - and remains - not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years - ten at the most. You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.

By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expectin…

It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In ma…

To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.

Forse, se tu gustassi anco una volta La millesima parte de la gioie Che gusta un cor amato riamando, Diresti, ripentita, sospirando: Perduto e tutto il tempo C…

I come without five lire. I want to leave without five lire.

Sometimes we get caught up in our troubles and our problems and we let life slip away, but life is precious, all of life, and one must try to take in as much o…