Instead I deepened what had always been my conviction: that what counts is the complexity of a culture in developing its various concrete aspects, in the things produced by labour, in its technical methods for doing things, in experience and knowledge and morality, in the values which become defined through practical work. In short, my idea had always been to join in building a cultural context capable of meeting the needs of a modern Italy and in which literature constituted an innovative force and the repository of the deepest convictions. On this basis, I renewed and strengthened my friendship with Elio Vittorini and together we published Il Menabò, a journal which came out a couple of times a year, between 1959 and 1966, and which followed or predicted the changes taking place in Italian literature, in ideas and in practice.

But now, once again, I have found a formula for putting something else before writing, namely my need for what I do to make sense as an innovative operation in the present cultural context, to be in some sense something that has never been attempted before, and which represents a further development of the possibilities of literary expression. I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. I would like to be like that, but I am not; my relationship with ideas is more complex and problematical; I always think of the pros and cons in everything and each time I have to construct a very complex picture. This is the reason why I can even go many years without publishing anything, working on projects which constantly end up in crisis.

Now that I am sixty, I have at last realized that the duty of the writer is simply to do what he knows how to do: storytellers have to tell stories, to portray, to invent. For many years I have given up laying down precepts about how one should write: what is the point of preaching one kind of literature or another, if then the things that you end up writing are maybe totally different? It took me a long time to realize that what counts is not your intention but what you actually achieve. So my literary work has become also a search for myself, an attempt to understand what I am.

The language of an artist, as Montale said, is ‘a language that is historicized, that has a relationship. It is valid in as much as it opposes, or differs from, other languages.’ How would you describe the identity of your language from this perspective?

This question ought to be turned back to you critics. I can only say that I try to counteract the mental laziness that is in evidence in the works of so many of my fellow-novelists in their use of a language that is as predictable and insipid as can be. I believe that prose requires an investment of all one’s verbal resources, just as poetry does: a spark and precision in the choice of words, economy and significance and inventiveness in their distribution and strategy, élan and mobility and tension in the sentence, and agility and ductility in shifting from one register to another, from one rhythm to another. For instance, writers who use too obvious or redundant adjectives or ones that are only there for an effect which they would be unable to achieve otherwise, can be considered in some cases as naïve, and in others as dishonest: in either case they are never people you can trust.