what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the s… - Natalia Ginzburg

I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba.

Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.

A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak.