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There was blood on the pillow and on the sheet, a large blackish stain that extended to his feet. Death is so repellent. Here I will say only that when I saw that body deprived of life, that body which I knew intimately, which had been happy and active, which had read so many books and had been exp…

[...] He never attempted generalizations or superfluous words. He was, rather, sharp, almost vulgar. If he is more important to you than yourself — he said one evening, seeming almost dazed — you should take him as he is: wife, children, that permanent tendency to sleep with other women, the vulgar…

[...] Throw him out, I repeated, when Nino tried to come near me. Franco kept him away, said calmly: Leave her alone, leave the room. Nino obeyed and I told Franco everything in the most confused way. He listened without interrupting, until he realized that I had no more energy. Only at that point …

On the evenings when I talked about my book in foreign cities I knew nothing about, there was a host of questions on the harshness of the political climate, and I got by with generic phrases that in essence rotated around the word “repress.” As a fiction writer, I felt obliged to be imaginative. No…

[...] I, on the other hand, in those French days, felt that I was at the center of chaos and yet had tools with which to distinguish its laws. That conviction, reinforced by the small success of my book, helped me to be somewhat less anxious about the future, as if, truly, everything that I was cap…