The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said… - Italo Calvino

The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.